Portfolio X-Ray - Reduced Functionality and Incorrect Graphing

pgavon

For those of you who are investors, the Portfolio X-Ray function (which uses an interface with Morningstar) plays a critical role in understanding the diversification and attributes of the whole and parts of your investment portfolio. It is probably the most important tool that facilitates Quicken providing the insight into your investment portfolio(s), unifying data to a single view from multiple sources of investment data. Quicken recently changed its process for populating the Portfolio X-Ray (through its interface with Morningstar) and in doing so reduced both the functionality of the tool and the accuracy of one of the graphs.

Specifically, the new "version" of the Portfolio X-Ray no longer allows the user to define which "benchmark" should be used against the actual data. Actually, the new version doesn't even bother to define the benchmarks used in the presentation. In addition, one of the graphs which depicts the overall view of diversification (the red dot) is wildly incorrect (see graphic below). Given the stock% weights compared to the Bmark%, the portfolio position indicator on the graph should be much closer to the middle of the triangle.

Finally, I have to hit the "Refresh X-Ray" button multiple times to get the data to populate, which should not be happening.

I am using the Windows 11 operating system and Quicken Classic Version R64.23.

Overall, my impression is that in this case, Quicken has reduced the functionality of the Portfolio X-Ray as opposed to improving it. I hope they did not make this change to save a few dollars at the cost of reducing the functionality of such an important tool.

I am a 30+ year user of Quicken and I am hoping that Quicken takes a look at the change it has made to this tool and reconsiders its decision.

Anyone else in my camp?

Jim_Harman

I agree that the "improved" portfolio X-Ray is not as useful as it was in previous versions.

For further discussion of issues with the new X-Ray, see this discussion

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7965127/r-64-19-improved-portfolio-x-ray-not-working

GW

I agree, While I have not recalculated everything, I noted the shift in mt weighting form middle to heavily weighted to Sensitive. I also noted a troubling shift in the Stock I noticed intersection. My fixed income just diapered.

pgavon

https://community.quicken.com/profile/GW - https://community.quicken.com/profile/Jim_Harman - Good point about the fixed income analysis being deleted from the functionality. This point is also touched on in the August 18th posting above, but does not fully describe that the whole fixed income chart (which shows relative bond quality and duration) is gone.

Chris_QPW

I am a 30+ year user of Quicken and I am hoping that Quicken takes a look at the change it has made to this tool and reconsiders its decision.

I hope people realize that Quicken isn't generating this. Quicken is feeding a MorningStar API information on your securities, and MorningStar is generating the webpages for Quicken to display. As far as Quicken is concerned this is just displaying an embedded web page.

If I had to take a wild guess, I would expect that MorningStar is the driver of this change.

pgavon

https://community.quicken.com/profile/Chris_QPW - You're kidding right??? Quicken can't just hand something off to a vendor, assume it will all work out fine, and not take any responsibility for what gets generated… Quicken should have tested the [Removed - Language] new interface to make sure it delivered at least the prior functionality without any issues. Assuming Morningstar created this problem, it should have never gotten this far if the Quicken quality assurance team were testing this diligently.

Chris_QPW

No, I'm not kidding. And I don't think you got what I meant.

Let's take a few recent examples.

Twice in the last few years, a bill system provider has decided to get out of the business and Quicken Inc has had to scramble to get another provider. This last one is ongoing. The new provider doesn't support as many as the last one (but is supposedly more reliable). Quicken Inc can't change the fact that they can't get a bill system provider that can support all the old billers.

Currently financial institutions are changing over from Direct Connect to Express Web Connect +. Direct Connect optionally provided a Quicken to financial institution bill payment system. Express Web Connect + doesn't. So, for any financial institution that used to provide Direct Connect/Bill Payment system that changes over to Express Web Connect + that option goes away. Nothing Quicken Inc can do about it.

I seriously doubt that MorningStar created this X-Ray Portfolio just for Quicken Inc. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but like I said I doubt it. If I'm right then Quicken Inc can make suggestions to change it and can try to influence that by saying they will go to another provider, but unless it is a custom job for Quicken Inc, they can't dictate what MorningStar will provide. No more than they can dictate to the company that provides the forum software for this site.

And my point was that no matter what the shortcomings are, Quicken Inc will have to ask MorningStar to make the changes, because they didn't generate what you are seeing.

In a lot of ways for the online services are in the same position you are. You are a customer, you can request features, bug fixes, and the like. Quicken Inc can decide to provide those based on their priorities (not yours). If your priorities/goals don't line up with Quicken Inc's then the one real leverage you have is to take your business elsewhere.

The same goes for Quicken Inc and their service providers, but every such change is costly and disruptive to their customers (anyone using those services), so they can't just jump around willy nilly.

pgavon

https://community.quicken.com/profile/Chris_QPW - I believe your premise is wrong - To my knowledge, Morningstar does not provide this service to any other personal financial software entities (and I have looked extensively). So it appears this is a custom offering to Quicken.

Generally speaking, you have confused partners and vendors - Banks are partners and Morningstar is a Vendor. Partners make accommodations to their systems / feeds to Quicken to allow them to accept customer data. So partners have no obligation to Quicken other than to work with Quicken to try to make sure the data can be transferred to Quicken for the use of the customers. Vendors provide a service to Quicken which they contract for and accordingly can define the scope and nature of the services provided.

With respect to Morningstar, I guarantee that Morningstar is getting compensation for what they provide as Morningstar is not providing this service out of the goodness of their heart. Morningstar does not "share" any customers like the banks do with Quicken. Such an arrangement means there is a contract between Quicken and Morningstar. At the outset of the relationship, it would make sense that they had an agreement on the Portfolio X-Ray functionality and its presentation on the Quicken application. At implementation, Quicken has the responsibility to "test" what Morningstar says it is delivering. Any changes to the approved product delivered would obviously need to be "re-tested" to make sure it still meets the original requirements.

So my point is that either 1) Quicken decided to reduce its cost for the Morningstar service (which would change the deliverable), 2) Morningstar has decided to discontinue what it offers (and therefore the deliverable and price to Quicken would change), or )3 Quicken just did not adequately "test" what Morningstar said it would deliver as the replacement deliverable under this new "process". If Morningstar decided to discontinue its offering to Quicken users, Quicken did no meaningful communication that the Portfolio X-Ray Functionality would be diminished. At the end of the day, the Quicken end-user suffers for something that is completely in the control of Quicken.

Like any business, Morningstar could decide not to provide the Portfolio X-Ray product anymore at which point Quicken would need to decide if they replace Portfolio X-Ray with another option or just decide to "retire" that functionality from Quicken - Either way, Quicken will solely determine what happens and why and should explain that decision to its users. Right now, we (the users) don't know anything has changed other than the reduced functionality.

Chris_QPW

Well, certainly if I got it wrong and this is a custom job for Quicken Inc, then that changes the whole picture.

Note I never said that Quicken Inc isn't paying MorningStar, just the opposite. It is just how much leverage they have with that payment. If this is a "commodity service" and Quicken Inc is one of many customers, their leverage goes down. But certainly, if they have paid MorningStar for this custom software they have lots of leverage.

But it still comes down to they have to tell MorningStar to fix it, they can't directly fix it.

q_lurker

Certainly looks like Morningstar offers X-Ray views to their own subscribers.

https://www.morningstar.com/help-center/portfolio/xray

Chris_QPW

BTW my assumption on this is based on the fact that Quicken Inc (a company with for few hundred employees) doesn't strike me as a company that would reach out to a very large company like MorningStar and contract a special API just for them. Doing something like that would be very costly, and I have my doubts MorningStar would even entertain such a contract.

MeToo

MorningStar offer access to their X-Ray service to other companies and most likely offers several levels of features based on the subscription level the external company has signed up for. Let's hope that the disappearance of the features from Quicken after the "improved X-Ray" update is not the result of Quicken changing their subscription level.

Chris_QPW

Up till now I just went off of my guess as a software developer, but I figured it was time to do a bit of research on this.

My quick research paints a completely different picture than what you found @pgavon (but the results points more towards your point of view)

MorningStar is definitely in the business of sale of APIs to generate reports and such from their data. And have a large selection of those services. This wouldn't be a custom contract:

https://developer.morningstar.com/direct-web-services/documentation/direct-web-services/about

On the other hand, looking at the APIs the user (Quicken Inc in this case) would have great flexibility in what they requested. And as such, I'm probably wrong, the fix will probably be on Quicken Inc's side.

pgavon

https://community.quicken.com/profile/Chris_QPW - If you look carefully, what I said was -

"To my knowledge, Morningstar does not provide this service to any other personal financial software entities (and I have looked extensively)".

I did not say that Morningstar doesn't provide this service to other financial planning or Investment firms who use the software in conjunction with their investing tools for their clients. And every one of those entities that has been using Portfolio X-Ray pays a "subscription" fee to Morningstar (usually a bulk rate) and you can bet that what gets presented (look, feel and content) to clients (individuals) is carefully negotiated with Morningstar. Fundamentally, every contract / installation with one of the financial planning / investment firm is a "custom contract"…. Quicken has the same ability to define its deliverable from Morningstar the same as every other financial planning / investment firm (since they are all paying for the privilege of using Portfolio X-Ray).

Rick8

This is a vital part of Quicken. Please Fix it or make it better!

mrzookie

Just upgraded to r64.25 and saw the "updated" portfolio x-ray functionality. It's a stripped down version of what was there previously, which was a stripped down version of what M* offered on their site. I was an M* user years ago when it was provided as part of their free membership. It was a really great tool, but it made no sense if you had a large number of securities/funds as it was too unwieldy to enter all the info by hand (and I didn't want them to have it anyway). I was pretty excited when Quicken decided to offer it, although somewhat disappointed when I saw how much was missing from the original. But, it covered my entire portfolio with no additional work, so that was a big plus.

My guess is that M* wanted more $ to license it, and Quicken didn't want to pay. Too bad they couldn't get it together and at least keep it the way it was.

pgavon

https://community.quicken.com/profile/mrzookie - Totally agree… My fear is that Quicken is going to throw us under the bus by not doing anything and just look away assuming the new update was "terrific"…. The most annoying thing is they sold it as "being able to load more efficiently" and did not say a word about the reduced capability…. Unless they just totally mismanaged this conversion and never properly tested it. Either way, its a bad look for Quicken….

Rick8

This is a key component for analyzing mutual funds for investors and a major reason many purchase the program.

It should be kept in at least the Premier Version which is "marketed" for serious investors!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

MeToo

Agree. This functionality is a key component of the investing features.

Looks like MorningStar has been making significant changes to their tools and subscriptions recently. If the loss of features in Premier X-Ray is the result of these changes, Quicken should at least communicate these changes and reasons to the users.

The current silence about the state of the X-Ray "update" (either a bug or a planed loss of functionality) is a direct indicator of how much Quicken values its customers.

Upcoming changes to our membership offerings, tools, and features

Rick8

If this was Morningstar that changed the data supplied, this feature would not work on the Quicken Versions R63.21 and earlier, which it does.

Chris_QPW

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20509621#Comment_20509621

The more I look at this I think it is Quicken Inc that changed this, but it is possible for something to work differently in two versions of Quicken and still be caused by a change from the vendor.

And example of this is the bill payment system. Currently Quicken Inc is changing to another bill payment system because the original vendor is getting out of the business. But the original vendor has clearly given some amount of overlap with the time that the new vendor is being implemented. So, currently people using one version of Quicken are using the old system and others with the newer version of Quicken are using the new one. Eventually, the old payment system will go away.

This is also possible if a vender wants to obsolete an old API (I don't think that is the case here now that I have looked into it, but it is "Possible")

Quicken Kristina

Hello All,

Thank you for providing your feedback on these changes to the Portfolio X Ray. This feedback has been forwarded to the proper channels for review.

Thank you!

(CBT-814)

MeToo

No offense intended (sincerely) as our hypotheses are all plausible considering the little information available, but we can spend a lot of time trying to second-guess what is happening. Or Quicken can just tell us as one can expect from a customer-oriented company. Just my two cents.

MeToo

@Quicken Kristina , hello, did you get an answer from the Quicken person to witch you forwarded our comments?

The basic question should be quite simple to answer: Is the removal of functionality in the X-Ray tab by design or is it a bug that will be fixed in the future?

Thanks for your help getting an answer and have a great day.

Quicken Kristina

Thank you for the follow-up,

So far, I have received a response for only one of the reported changes, and I posted that response to the appropriate discussion:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20511020#Comment_20511020

I'm still waiting for a response on the other changes.

Sorry I don't have more news!

MeToo

Thanks Quicken Kristina.

While there is some overlap between the two discussions, it looks like the discussion you pointed at is more about limitations in the new X-Ray implementation while this conversation is more about missing functionality.

I'm not dealing with the limitations described in the other conversation, and my interest is in understanding if the removal of functionality in the new X-Ray page is by design and permanent or a bug that needs investigation and fixing.

I do not understand why it is taking so long to answer this simple question. Hopefully, somebody at Quicken (Product Manager?) decides when features are added or removed to a product. So, this individual should be able to answer very quickly if the missing features are by design or not by design. If not by design, then I understand that it may take time to investigate and solve the issue.

Can you please ask this question to the Product Manager (Product Owner?) and get a quick answer? If these features have been purposely removed, then I need to find another tool to analyse my investments and this is going to require work and money and I do not want to go through this effort if the functionality will be restored in Quicken. The later will be definitely my preference.

Thanks again for your help.

pgavon

For anyone keeping track-

It's been one month since the start of the discussion around the issues with Portfolio X-Ray. This is the feature you buy in Quicken Premier to manage you overall diversification and risk exposure. The feature you pay more for… What have we heard from Quicken on what is being done to remediate the issues??? Nothing…. Crickets….

My guess is that the Quicken technical staff are "all hands on deck" for the EWC+ conversions and will not be addressing these Portfolio X-Ray problems anytime soon….

Sooooo Frustrating……..

Rick8

Yes pgavon, Clearly not spending the money on good programmers, rather stupid commercials of a guy clipping grass with a nail clipper. Very informative.