Bond Price Updates

Question

I've used Quicken for nearly 30 years now.  I notice that my Bond holdings at Fidelity do not get updated with pricing information everyday, even though I run the Update Manager every day.  Looking at my bond holdings, it appears that in general the price is updated approximately 3x/week.  This is annoying when the date "missed" happens to fall on the last trading day of the month, in which case the holding balances as per EOM statement from Fidelity don't match with Quicken.  Even trying to update historical quotes doesn't fix.  Why?

Strup · Answer

My Fidelity daily bond pricing updates stopped a week ago.  Today, I used Reset Account to reauthorize transaction and pricing downloads from Fidelity for all my accounts.  Bond pricing as of August 1 were then downloaded.  I can only assume that there were issues with the new interface between Quicken and Fidelity that require reauthorization to fix.

Boatnmaniac · Answer

You must have reauthorized your Fidelity account(s) to EWC+ earlier this week.  If so, this is one of the several significant issues some people are encountering with Fidelity's EWC+ connection.  Quicken and Fidelity are both well aware of this (and the other issues) and have dedicated teams working to resolve them but for now there is no fix for this EWC+ issue.

What many people are doing is to restore a recent backup file (from before the reauthorization was done).  The DC connection will still be present and connected in that file.  So you can use DC for your Fidelity accounts without needing to do anything other than run OSU, at least until the issues are resolved or until the 8/20 forced migration date.

A couple of things to note if you do restore the backup file:

* If/when you are prompted to reauthorize, again, make sure you decline doing that by clicking on the "Remind me later" link at the bottom right of that prompt popup.  This will allow you to keep the DC connection.
* All EWC and EWC+ connections with other financial institutions will be broken by the backup file restoration process so those connections will need to be set up, again.  But that is just a 1X process.

bmciance · Answer

Bond prices don't come from the Quicken quote provider, they come from your broker.  That means it is a Fidelity issue, not Quicken.  I have Fidelity accounts but I don't have any bonds there.  I also have accounts at Schwab and I do have some bonds there.  My bond prices at Schwab are updated daily.

The reason updating historical quotes doesn't fix the issue is that those quotes come from the Quicken quote provider which only gives you prices for stocks, ETFs and Mutual Funds, not bonds.

Note that bond pricing is a calculation done by brokers based on current interest rates unlike stock/ETF prices which come from the markets.  This is why they will never come from the Quicken quote provider.

Edit:  One other thing is that bond prices are updated when you download transactions, not when you hit Update Quotes.  If you don't download every day you won't get updated bond prices for the days that you don't download.  Another factor is when Fidelity updates their bond prices.  It's not like stock prices that are updated constantly during the day. Most brokers update their bond prices some time at night.