For investments, add ability to calculate Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR)

adesalos

Is this metric readily available? Can I set it up, or export, to do a calculation? Is there a plan to make it available in a future release?

jacobs

No, there is no CAGR column in any of Quicken Mac's investment Portfolio views.

I have asked a moderator to change this post into an Idea post — a request for a new feature — so now fellow Quicken users can add their votes in the yellow box above if they'd like to see such a feature added. When Idea topics reach a certain number of votes, the feature request is then sent to the development team to consider for implementation. Only when such Ideas become marked as "Planned" do we know a feature will definitely be added in some future release. (But some features get added by the developers without them originating as an Idea thread here, so we don't know if this might be something already in their future plans.) Just to set your expectations properly, I'd note that it can take a lot of time to first mamas the votes needed to get the developers to consider a feature request, then have them evaluate it and decide to move forward with it, and then have time for it on their development schedule. In most cases, think years, not weeks or months. 😉

Since CAGR requires starting and ending dates to calculate, it's not something which could be added as a column in the existing Portfolio view unless they implemented it for fixed time periods (such as CAGR-1 year, CAGR-3 years, CAGR-5 years, etc.) A better solution might be to create this as a report — when they eventually create investment reports — since reports have beginning and ending dates. (But I'm not sure how it could calculate CAGR if the time period selected were to include additional share purchases or sales.)

You could export the data you need to create a calculation in a spreadsheet. Since CAGR requires a beginning value and and ending value, you would do two exports. First, select the investment account or accounts (such a Brokerage, Retirement, or all Investing). Go to the Portfolio view, and set the filter for Portfolio Value. Make sure Market Value is one of the visible columns. Change the As Of date to your desired starting date, and Export the table (click the ••• icon in the upper right, and select Export > Export to CSV. Change the As Of date to your desired ending date, and Export again. Now you can open these two CSV files in your spreadsheet program of choice, and copy the Market Value column from one spreadsheet into the other. (If you added or removed any securities in your list, you'll have to manually adjust the rows so you accurately have the correct starting and ending values for each security.) Then you can create a formula on the first row to the calculate the CAGR:
(((Ending Value ÷ Beginning Value) ^ (1 ÷ number of years)) - 1) x 100
and copy the cell with the formula down to all the rows.

Again, this works only if you haven't bought additional shares or sold some shares of the investments you're evaluating within your time period; the change in value from adding or removing shares would mess up the CAGR calculation.