Portfolio view historical valuation of CD's is zero

Question

I am a newer Quicken Mac user.  My investment information has been flowing from Schwab and  all seems good regarding current valuation and past transaction information.  If I look at the value of my Portfolio a year ago that value seems to reflect the cash balance and other securities, but not  CD's.  That is, for a CD that had value one year ago and doesn't today since it has matured, shows as zero value in the Portfolio view both when viewed as of todays date with a one-year time horizon, or viewed as of one year ago.

I did not make any changes to the downloaded transactions.  Should I have?  Some change I have to make?

ljpwright · Answer

You've provided some insight to places to look.  These transaction are "buy bonds", followed by "payment/deposit" at maturity.  When the "bond" is purchased there is an appropriate positive "invest amt" that is added to offset the cash spent, but there is not a debit to that "invest amt" when the cash comes back as a "payment/deposit" type of transaction.  If I change the maturity transaction to be "sell bond", and put in the requisite security detail with 9 digit code (not sure this is required), it does show as negative "invest amt" to offset the returning cash.

It gets me wondering if Quicken zeros out the bond's investment value if it reaches maturity and never has a book-end sell transaction to balance the original buy transaction.  I have changed a few of them but it does not seem that Quicken is making any changes in the Portfolio amount.

Have you seen the past portfolio value change based on changing of past transactions?

jacobs · Answer

@ljpwright  Okay, so let's follow the path of those CDs in the account.

* Was there cash in the investment account prior to the CD purchases?
* Were the CD purchases recorded as Type=Buy transactions, using up cash in the account?
* When the CDs matured, were they recorded as Type=Sell transactions, creating cash in the account?

Here's an test case:

* I created a Test CD account to show a simplified example.
* I transferred $100,000 into the account from my checking account on 1/1/23. This cash is needed to purchase the bonds (CDs). You might have cash in your existing brokerage account from other activities including the sales of other holdings, but it needs to be showing more than the purchase price of the CDs on or before the purchase date.
* On the maturity date of 12/31/23, I recorded a payment of $5,000 interest, and the Sale of the $100,000 of "Bonds".
* I then transferred the resulting $105,000 to my checking account. This is just to illustrate that the value of the account is now zero but was not zero last year.

So here are those transactions in the register:

And here is the portfolio graph showing the value of the investment while it existed.

Here is the Portfolio with the As Of date set back to 10/31/23 while the CD/"Bond" was still held:

Notice the table below the chart shows the CD security and its value on the As Of date of 10/31/23.

I'm not sure how your downloads from Schwab differed from this example, particularly for the payment of interest of the CD, but I'm hoping this sample might lead you to see which transaction(s) may have been recorded incorrectly.

ljpwright · Answer

Thanks Jacobs…sounds like you know a good bit here, enough to ask the right questions.  Yes, these CDs were purchased as individual items within an account that is neither hidden nor closed.  The CD's came into Quicken as a "bond" with type "other bond" rather than coming in as a CD as I might expect.