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Please Help in Requesting Quicken to Increase Number of Supported Investment Securities

billr

I am running Windows 11, Quicken Premier, version R63.21. For years, and on numerous occasions, I have asked Quicken Support to consider increasing the number of securities accommodated by Quicken Premier. Currently, the maximum number of securities allowed is 2,000. For those of us who are "old timers" and have been using Quicken for MANY years, that limit is rapidly becoming a serious constraint. Note that securities purchased/sold many years ago cannot be deleted (because the cash accounts used for these transactions) are reconciled) even if these securities are no longer in use.

Quicken Support has never responded to my numerous requests. I am hoping that others who may read this post may have a similar need and will comment here in case Quicken Support reads these comments. If so, and since there is strength in numbers, if many Quicken users echo my request, perhaps we can obtain some action from Quicken.

Thanks for any help.

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Quicken Kristina

Hello @billr,

Thank you for coming to the Community to provide your feedback! We have a Product Ideas section of the Community where people create and vote on Idea posts to request new features and improvements to existing features. Ideas that get enough votes may be implemented in the future.

There is an existing Idea post asking for the same thing you are:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7874843/increase-maximum-number-of-securities-from-2000-to-next-level

If you haven't already done so, please add your vote and a comment.

Thank you!

Jim_Harman

@billr From what I have read, the 2,000 "trackable" securities is not a hard limit, and users have reported using significantly more securities than that without problems. The issue for investing accounts arrears to be slow performance if there are more than about 10,000 transactions in a single account.

Have you run into actual limits, or is this just a concern as you approach 2,000?

billr

My file shows Securities/Max ref 1814/1814 so it is just a concern now. As far as transactions go, I have 75,420 transactions in the DATA FILE. I do not know how to determine the number of transactions in a single ACCOUNT, but I'm betting it's way more then 10,000 in the largest account. I have noticed slower performance, as the size of my QDF file is 97,507K.

Thanks for info!

Chris_QPW

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20503722#Comment_20503722

By far the biggest problem with investment accounts (from a performance standpoint) is the number of transactions/security lots/securities in a given investment account. It is one reason I sort of wonder about the supposed 2,000 security limit (which some people have reported that they have exceeded). Afterall if you have that many securities the investment register problem might be the bigger problem.

If you bring up the Account List (Ctrl+A) it shows the number of transactions in a given account. If you don't the # of Transactions column select the Options button to turn it on.

I'm also not sure if it is purely the number of transactions that cause performance problems, I think part of it is that Quicken is calculating the security lots whenever you do anything.

billr

Thanks..I turned it on. The most in any account is slightly more than 10K and I don't use those accounts anymore as they are just history from closed accounts. I'm surprised it's that "low" given the years I have been using Quicken to handle my investments.

q_lurker

Note that the performance issues being cited are limited to the account with the high number of transactions etc. That account is slow to respond while other accounts behave normally.

jmaino

I'm in the same situation, and a very active trader - i have both a very large # of securities, as well as accounts with many transactions. I see horrible performance on my dataset - opening an investment account in the register can take upwards of 90-120seconds per acct - even those accounts that do not exceed some 10k transaction threshold - which make me believe there are issues not-only related to the #transactions per acct, but there's some significant interaction w/ the large # of defined securities.

Upon opening a, I get a dialog box (for about 15seconds) that tells me it's "Recalculating investment Account Values", then it's replaced w/ another dialog box that remains for the pseudo-eternity that tells me that it's "Checking Securities….", starting at 0%, crawling upwards towards 5%, then in a flash, completing. Most of the time, Windows also tells me in the header of these dialogs that Quicken is not responding (ie: "Checking securities (Not Responding)" ) . I can watch in the process monitor and see Q is getting 11-15% of my CPU, and performing 0MB/s Disk or Network activity - so it's neither file nor network access in my case.

I am taking the action of moving all securities to a new account each year, to keep the #transactions/acct low - which is hampered by the fact that Q will not transfer short securities from one acct to another (yes, another issue request has been filed for an enhancement in this area, as well). So, the accts I use the most have no more than 2500 or so transactions this year - yet still experience this issue.

I've brought this up before, and many of the respondents here, have also responded to my prior posts. I've filed issue reports and have sent-in data to support my requests for improvement in the past.

For reference:

QDF file size: 173639K
Securities 21439/21439

YES - a terribly high # of defined securities - but this is also >30 years, with very active options trading (so, many custom-defined securities for put/call transactions).

BTW: Things are also terribly slow when doing simple things like typing in the name of a security, let's say to close a position; Q seems to be string-searching the investment dataset name for auto-complete - but it's painfully slow, as in it appears to be matching one-character only every 1-2 seconds. This also implicates an interaction with the size of the #defined securities, and not the investment acct transaction size. I can't fathom why, even w/ ~21k names, this would be this way on modern hardware. The first few chars may be slow, but it appears almost-as-if Q is not keeping track of those matches from the first several char's typed, and re-searching the entire set of names as ea char is typed, rather than matching from within what's already been matched?

I would love to see things improved for whatever precipitates the issues, at least in my case, and I'm willing to help, if I can.

q_lurker

@jmaino So at what point do you realize that Quicken is not a good platform for a trader as active as you are? At least not for your level of investment accounts. We went through this a bit a year ago in this discussion. You seem to expect a change. I don't.

jmaino

@q_lurker - I realize it's not optimal. I continue to use it b/c I don't really have a good replacement.

But, I continue to hope that there are glaring, and easy to resolve deficiencies, that can and will be addressed, that may bring a wildly improved experience, not only for myself, but for those like @billr and the 27 others who up-voted on his 2023 request to-date.

Example - are we string-searching the entire dataset on ea char entered, vs checking newly entered char's against what's already been matched? If so, that's an elementary computer science issue. I've spent the majority of my career in the software space - and I know of very few Software Engineers who wouldn't gladly improve things like this, when they are made aware of it. Shortcuts are often made w/o seeing or being able to measure the impact on situations that are not forecasted - but shedding some light on the situation should be able to bring about improvements, or do you disagree?

Another example was perhaps a yr ago when @Quicken Kristina (I believe?) quickly reproduced an issue re: the large security dataset when adding new securities to a report, and had the problem resolved within a few days. That's not possible unless ppl ID and request things unforeseen by the development team at the time they put code in place.

I guess the bigger question is - why can't Q? serve these needs? I haven't yet heard a good answer to that from you other than telling ppl like me we should look elsewhere. Is there a real, sound technical reason for that, or the absence of desire to improve in this area? I can assure you, Q, esp since moving to a subscription model of recurring revenue, does not want to officially state they have no desire to improve upon issues brough forth by their paying community, nor bucketize their user base into those who they'll support, and those who should find another product.

It's clear I'm not alone even though my use model might be the most-extreme being reported.

Phil

There is also a problem with a large number of securities when producing an Investment Income Report.

With settings Earliest to Date and Subtotal by Security, you get a report that shows only the first two securities. The report cannot be scrolled left or right to see the rest. And some items on the screen are jumbled or missing (like the security names). Previous experiments have shown that 72 is the maximum number of securities that will work. More than that will cause the problem described.

This has been mentioned as long ago as two years. I also sent a feedback report from within Quicken. There has been no response and no fix. This is not a minor issue. 72 is a small number of securities. The inability to create a valid report with 73 or more is a real problem and should be a priority to the folks at Quicken.

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7939719/problem-with-investment-income-report

Chris_QPW

Just as I thought, the 2000 security limit was just the tip of the iceberg.

I guess the bigger question is - why can't Q? serve these needs? I haven't yet heard a good answer to that from you other than telling ppl like me we should look elsewhere. Is there a real, sound technical reason for that, or the absence of desire to improve in this area?

Without being able to see the code I can only make an educated guess based on my 40+ years as a programmer and from what I can see of the code using debugging tool, but my guess is that the problem is technical/not worth the resources to service a small percentage of people that don't really fall into their majority use cases.

I personally think that this section of the code is poorly done, but that is probably due more to history than to anything else. To this day, you will see that they refer to the "investment register" as "investment transaction lists", because that is in fact how they started. Note that you have "banking registers". So, at a fundamental design level most likely the database isn't setup ideally. On top of that when I look at how the "investment register" is put together in the GUI in comparison to the banking register they are completely different. The banking register seems to be a much more cohesive GUI arrangement and the "investment register" seems very much like a lot of individual GUI components stuck together. I suspect that most of Quicken's performance problems are in the GUI. I have feeling that no one really wants to touch that code, for fear a breaking it.

For instance, when they finally got around to the request "Allow me to edit/deleted multiple transactions in the investment register", they implemented it by opening up a completely different window to do the selecting of the transactions. Why didn't they just allow the user to select them in the register? I think it is because of the fundamental way that "register" is put together. It just doesn't lend itself to be extended in what might seem like a normal way if the register was actually setup as "unified table".

This is kind of question where customers say things like "well if that's the problem why can't you just rewrite it".

And the answer is a combination of "too dangerous", "too much work", "not enough demand for it".

This definitely falls into the same category as "I live in Japan, can I use Quicken?".

And the answer is "I you can make it work for you as is, great. Otherwise, sorry I can't really help you with that, it isn't what Quicken was designed for."

jmaino

Thanks, @Chris_QPW - appreciate you looking around and giving your perspective.

The arbitrary "limit", really is something that is going to rear its ugly head again and again.

In my situation, I may well be SOL. However, the real challenge for both the Quicken team and others who are already impacted in some way, shape, or form, is that they're suddenly realizing that their time may soon come as well, where after the addition of one added security, they find themselves SOL as well.

Chris_QPW

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20503906#Comment_20503906

I will point out like has been mentioned before, it is believed that the 2000 security limit really doesn't exist. People have exceed it. Maybe at one time it was, and now it is changed, or maybe it was more a suggestion, that got put into the documentation as an actual limit. I have found quite a few things in Quicken documentation that are wrong, and even after pointing that out they didn't change it. I think it might come under the heading of "It would take a lot of effort to find out if this is true or not, so just leave it alone." kind of thing.

What usually happens though for "active traders" is that the performance is so bad that they do things like create a new data file (that is possible because I don't think anyone actually has 2,000+ active securities, it is just that you can't delete an inactive security without deleting the transactions that use it) and start over or maybe go to some other program. I suspect that is one reason why the 2000 security limit problem doesn't get "hit" that much.

Out of curiosity I created a QIF file with 3000 securities in it, and then imported it into a new data file.

It created them with no problems. How useful such a data file would be where the securities are actually being used in transactions is certainly much more questionable.

jmaino

@Chris_QPW, yeah, the 2000 thing is what I meant by arbitrary. It's certainly not 2000 as a fact, but there's something there that the entirety of the community, and no Quicken personnel, can quantify and define for its users. What makes it worse is that some parts of the tool are actually falling apart at 73, not 2000, and not 21000, as is evidenced by the response from @Phil earlier. Although I have to think this is likely more-so in the category of a bug than my situation is, this whole conversation began from the fact that @billr is nearing 1900 and worried about approaching some unquantifiable point in which troubles creep their way into his use-model - which may not happen until 2100, or 3000, or…..

The fact that we can't say where and when this will occur, is really one of the most-disturbing manifestations of the limits imposed by "oh, we weren't designed for this".

In @billr 's case, even though unlikely to describe himself as "active", the fact that ppl have been using the SW for so long, brings them near-to, and/or in excess of these limits w/o really trying too hard. This makes time-in-use the enemy of the software, as well.

You're dead-on correct - most of the securities are no longer in use (past option expiry) - but there's no way to mark as-such, as you have also said. Active at any one time? I'd say never more than 200 or so symbols for me.

I go thru the trouble of moving securities from one acct_2024 to acct_2025 each yr, so, whenever searching for "what do i need to understand about this acct and its securities", it'd seem obvious that when opening an acct investment "register", one must only look at the securities that that account actively holds or ever held, and not the whole of the dataset, for any first-gloss notions of figuring out what's inside (the security view knows what acct's have ever seen the security, so the acct's could know what securities are held within). So, if this was done, 10'yr old option symbols would never need to be looked-at again, unless someone goes to add to the register (albeit, mistakenly in all likelihood). So, a self-cleaning sort of pre-pruning of the dataset. I'd be happy to incur some lags if I try to add something to an acct that wasn't in there before (but is in my dataset), compared to everything being painfully slow and impeded.

There are surely ways to improve things, and it's easy for us to posit would-be solutions - but as I mentioned in another post about performance and large security datasets long ago, it's about the product team wanting to invest in improving these behaviors, and prioritizing such.

I am sorry for, but truly happy that others are finding and reporting connected issues to this. Hopefully critical mass helps yield some prioritization.

BrittMayo

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20503722#Comment_20503722

My QDF is 431,000K, with a max account of 23,000 transactions, and I've seen many folks who've been using Quicken much longer than I have (23 years).

If you haven't moved your QDF to SSD, that makes an IMMENSE difference.