What is Cash in Investments?

willeaton

Quicken for Mac, V7.9.1

Quicken is showing an investment of Cash in Securities in black font vs the others all in Blue and I'm not sure what this is.

RickO

Cash reflects the uninvested cash sitting in an account. If you look at the register of an individual investing account, the number in the Balance column will match the Cash value at the bottom of the account's Portfolio > Portfolio Value screen.

If you are referring to the Holdings pane on the Investing Dashboard, the Cash at the bottom of this pane is the same number. The reason that the individual held securities are in blue vs the Cash shown in black is to indicate that these lines are clickable to bring up the popup menu (below). Why they don't use the blue font in the Portfolio > Portfolio Value screen, I don't know.

willeaton

Thank you for helping me on this.

I followed your instructions and see that in my Vanguard account, I have $100 in a Money Market Fund, where in Quicken, this $100 is split between Money Market $60 and Cash $40. Quicken should show all of this in MM and not Cash. If I got to Window and Securities, Cash is not listed to Merge these. Thoughts?

RickO

You don't say if you are downloading transactions, but looking at the transaction history in the register's Transactions tab is where you need to go to figure this out. In that register, you will see in the Balance column $40 on the latest date. That is where the cash resided. If you enter a Buy transaction for an amount of $40 and for the MM security, then you will reduce the cash by $40 (to zero) and increase the holding in the MM by $40. Then if you go back to the portfolio or dashboard, you should see $100 for the MM and $0 for Cash.

If you are downloading, it sounds like a transaction (or more) missed getting downloaded or got deleted.

One other possibility is that Vanguard is transmitting the wrong info. You should search the transaction register for the word "placeholder". These are automatic adjustment transactions that Quicken creates to try to make your register agree with what Vanguard is sending. If you see such a transaction for the MM, you could try deleting it (after making a backup) and see if that fixes it. If it doesn't you can Edit > Undo to reverse the delete action, or revert to the backup.