Investment Account with Many Transactions - Poor Performance

Question

I have an investment account that holds several SMAs. The account has been open since April 2021. The register has 14,783 transactions as of today.  Needless to say, register performance is suffering. It currently takes 39 seconds for a Lot Identification on a Sell transaction to be entered into the register after I click OK.  That's too much time waiting around given there are 30-50 sales a month so I am trying to figure out how to proceed to improve performance.

I know there is the Closed Position archive option (How do I archive investment transactions?).

I also discovered an older thread where a poster suggested the following approach:

When I find the decay excessive (per my standards), I open a new account, use Shares Transferred to move existing holdings to the new account leaving all historical in the older account for later review, and possibly correction if needed.  I do not bother with 'closing' the older account.  Though the option to archive has been available for a while, that also is a tool I have not used.  I don't see the need, in my usage.

I'd appreciate more feedback from users about which option might be best. Preserving the accounts intact and starting a "new" one appeals to me but obviously Quicken recommends the archiving solution. Curious about others' experience. Thanks!

GermanBlueRam · Answer

Quicken's archive process worked reasonably well for me this week, in an account with a very high level of trading activity.  I was glad to see that even though I "hid" the archive from my account list, I am still able to use it for current-year reporting.  The register is still slower than I would like, when entering transactions, but it's much more tolerable.

I create a new Quicken file each year, and at the end of this year, I will probably also apply the procedure in which I transfer open positions (and their cost bases) to a new account.  This workaround has worked smoothly for me in the past (I have done it every couple of years in the past).  Unlike many users (I suspect) I will then delete the old account from the current-year file; doing so allows me to delete a large number of option securities with expired CUSIPs (options are a significant contributor to the transaction volume indicated in this screenshot).

q_lurker · Answer

I believe the entire holding in the security needs to be closed for that security to be archived. But the archive process also extracts the dividend-type transactions including reinvestments and (I would expect) any MiscExp transactions associated with that security.  So if fees and taxes are tied to a closed security, they would (could) also be archived.

You can certainly back up your file, archive, and then restore if you don’t like the results.

Jim_Harman · Answer

You can back up your data file, then try the archive and see what impact it has on your performance. If you don't like the result, restore the backup.

Please let us know what you find.