nav[aria-label="Primary Navigation"] { padding: 0; & ul { list-style: none; width: 100%; display: flex; flex-direction: row; justify-content: start; align-items: start; gap: 30px; padding: 0; & li { margin: 0; } & ul li { list-style: none; } } }

Proposal: Improve Management of Older Equity Price History

BK65

I would like to suggest a more efficient way for Quicken to handle equity price history that is more than five years old.

Recommended Changes

Retain only weekly closing prices for equity data older than five years.
Automatically remove older detailed price records that are no longer necessary.
Allow users to retrieve older historical price data online when needed.

Why This Would Help

The current process is time-consuming for users. As a Quicken user since 1997, I have also seen the Qdata file grow larger than necessary over time. This change could improve efficiency and performance while still preserving useful historical information.

Given today’s gigabit internet speeds, older detailed price data could be accessed online whenever needed instead of being stored locally in full.

Find more posts tagged with

Investments

Add/Edit Transactions

File Import

Reviewed

Transactions

Product Enhancements

Status: Reviewed

Comments

BK65

I posted on the Reddit Quicken Community and had this comment.

"Some things to consider though. 1) I would want month-end prices regardless of when it falls during the week. 2) I would want prices for any time a trade is made of course."

Jim_Harman

I would support this Idea it it actually leads to a significantly smaller data file size. It appears that quote data takes up very little space and currently, deleting prices in the price history does not reduce the file size (see update below).

I agree with the Reddit comment and would add that when downloading price history for a newly added security, Quicken should include all month-end prices, not just weekly prices, as discussed in this Idea:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7957372/include-month-end-prices-in-all-historical-price-updates

Update: To test whether the file size decreases, I added a security to a test file. This downloaded the past month of daily prices (about 20), the previous 11 months of weekly prices (about 45) and 4 years before that of monthly prices (48) for a total of about 113 prices. The QDF file grew by 6,530 bytes, or less than 58 bytes per quote. That is hardly enough to worry about, given the size of today's disk drives.

In addition, I deleted the security and the file stayed the same size. However, when I added back a different security, the file only grew by 159 bytes. So deleting prices does not make the file smaller, but most of the space is re-used if you add a new security.

My conclusions: The space taken by securities and quote data is insignificant, and Quicken is already pretty good at re-using the space from deleted entries.

Boatnmaniac

Quicken would need to make sure to not delete any prices history for any transactions that have occurred, regardless of when they occurred in each month. Otherwise there will be cost basis and cap gains issues that would compromise Quicken's Tax Reports and Tax Planner.

I like the concept but it concerns me that something will go wrong that will adversely impact Quicken's reliability regarding this. How would Quicken be able to ensure that this does not become a problem?

UKR

Quicken does not delete Price History records for days where there were transactions. If you decide to delete the price history, those records will be recreated based on actual transactions on file.

You can run a Validate with options to "Correct investing price history". Select functions "Delete" or "Repair and Rebuild".
When done, running an Update Historical Prices will rebuild recent price history, as mentioned by @Jim_Harman above, for as many securities as still exist.

q_lurker

That assumes the price history data is used to determine cap gain info. I don’t believe that to be the case.

The normal situation would be that you buy at some intraday price but the closing price (typically a different value) gets recorded in the price history records. There is no record of the transaction price in the PH records. One could even have several transactions of the same security on one day. Quicken must be either creating a lot-by-lot cost record (likely IMO) or going back to the transaction history as needed (unlikely IMO).