Multi-currency Brokerage Accounts

ta1835

I cannot be the only Canadian who is frustrated by the inability to hold different currency stocks, ETF, etc. within a single Brokerage account inside Quicken. My broker, IBKR, does a perfect job of downloading all investment transactions and holdings into Quicken. Stocks, Mutual Funds, ETF, dividends etc. download whether from Nasdaq, NYSE, Toronto etc. After that however the stocks that are not Canadian dollar cannot be edited, changed or manually entered in same account. On top of that, while the Quicken account thinks it is CAD $, the quotes for US stocks download in US $ numerically correct but from a currency standpoint they are incorrect. US stocks display as if the downloaded quote is CAD - drastically undervaluing the items.

Since brokerages (at least IBKR) are able to serve all the correct data to Quicken via webconnect download, why can't Quicken make brokerage accounts multi-currency? This would save all of us Canadian investors (and any American's who buy cross border) a lot of time and aggravation.

Chris_QPW

Why can't Quicken make brokerage accounts multi-currency?

Let's think that for a second, not even bringing in the complications of a brokerage account type.

Normal credit card account:

Every amount you see is the same currency.

That means in the database they can be stored as a single floating-point number. Now you want one number to have one currency, and another to have a different one. The first thing you have to do is store not only that amount, but the currency for every single amount. This is a BIG change in the structure of the database and every process what is dealing with it.

Just think about how this is represented in the account. You now have to have some way to represent that. Maybe now put in the currency symbol? But that is just the start of the problems. How do you "add them up". You now need transaction by transaction currency conversions. Or maybe the user would like to see the different amounts broken out in some manner? And this has ramifications for the reports tool. What would an "account report" look like?

Basically, to have "true multiple currency support" every number in Quicken would have to be treated in the same manner as a security. With a security you have both an amount and the "what is it" (security type). This would be no different for currencies.

And there are many other ramifications.