Quicken Quotes Server on the Fritz?

@Chris_QPW Oops, did I answer the right question? Those are the funds that came back with yesterday's numbers. I have no symbols for TSP funds at all.

Well, I got the right NAVs for 15 other funds, just those 4 are coming back wrong at the moment. Also, that's what I thought about the TSP, but @fizzylogic had mentioned he was getting them somehow.

fizzylogic said:

PS: This forum appears be running on different software since the last time I visited regularly, several years ago. To address a response to a particular user, do you simply type "@Name" at the beginning of your comment? There doesn't seem to be a "reply" button.

There isn't really "reply to".  You can do quote a like above, and their name at the top is an "@ link" that gives them an alert that for a "mention".  The same thing happens for a @Name.

> @Chris_QPW said:
> Sounds like Apple decided to "optimize" Numbers so that "real time" traders wouldn't keep "bothering" their servers.   
>
> As in it caches the prices it gets, and doesn't get them again unless you restart.

Yep, there are a number of threads dealing with this issue on the discussions.apple.com boards. Some users over there said that when STOCK and STOCKH were first added to Numbers a few years ago, the STOCK function would return real-time (or slightly delayed) quotes throughout the market day. Some time after Yahoo was purchased by Verizon, this feature was stripped out and neither STOCK nor STOCKH would return anything newer than the previous market closing prices.

Regarding caching and need for restart, I may have spoken too soon. I wrote the spreadsheet on Numbers 6.1, but I also have a copy open on my Big Sur machine running Numbers 10.3.9, with the date range set for March 1 thru March 31. Although I hadn't messed with it since yesterday, it seems to have updated itself with today's closing prices, so it does seem to be polling the Yahoo quote server on its own. Now, I can't be certain that the one running under Numbers 6.1 wouldn't have also updated itself if I hadn't been repeatedly relaunching it. I expect all will be revealed over the next day or two.

> @Chris_QPW said:
> Sounds like Apple decided to "optimize" Numbers so that "real time" traders wouldn't keep "bothering" their servers.   
>
> As in it caches the prices it gets, and doesn't get them again unless you restart.

Yep, there are several threads about this on other boards. I can't verify since I’ve just started with Numbers, but user "SGIII" wrote on discussions.apple.com that when STOCK and STOCKH were first added a few years ago, the STOCK function returned real-time (or slightly delayed) quotes throughout the trading day. Later, after Yahoo was purchased by Verizon, this feature was stripped out and neither STOCK nor STOCKH would return quotes newer than the last closing price.

With regard to caching, I may have spoken too soon. I wrote my spreadsheet on Numbers 6.1, but I’ve been keeping a copy open on my Big Sur machine running Numbers 10.3.9, with a date range of March 1 thru March 31. I hadn’t messed with it since yesterday, but when I checked a while ago, it showed today’s closing prices. So, it seems to be polling the Yahoo quote server on its own. Now, I can’t be sure that the Numbers 6.1 copy on my High Sierra machine wouldn’t have updated itself if I hadn’t repeatedly relaunched it. We’ll know for sure in the next day or two.

Sorry for the (nearly) duplicate comment above about quote updating and caching. The first one disappeared after I tried to edit it, but now I see it has returned, after I wrote it again from scratch.

Also, a question: How does one make quoted comments appear in the grey, indented box? My posts just have a ">" symbol in front of each line of the quoted material. Is this another "I don't have enough points yet" kind of issue, or are there some formatting tools I haven't found?

As of an hour ago in Excel the mutual funds hadn't updated.  As of now it is about half of the mutual funds, Vanguard and Fidelity funds are updated, but your HACAX and a couple from my wife's 401K haven't update yet.

Note I'm using the stock history function in Excel, because as you noted the "stock" on is about reporting just the one price (or the previous) so "current", but yes that one will return yesterday's price like you noted until update for today.  None of this is "real time" or even "today" for mutual funds.

I just updated again and they have all updated now.  So basically it looks like they start trickling in about 10am or so Pacific time and by noon (or maybe a bit sooner like 11am, I didn't check then) are finished.

> @DanaJ said:
> @Chris_QPW Interestingly, at the moment, the Numbers “STOCK” function is returning the correct NAV for yesterday (for HACAX), while “STOCKH” is still returning the March 9 value for yesterday’s date. (If anyone with Numbers can confirm this, I won’t have to call my Psychiatrist.)

I've been playing with this for the past couple of hours, and see the same thing for pretty much any mutual fund, but not stocks. Interestingly, the STOCK function pulls in the "current" quote from the top of the Yahoo Finance page (see attached screenshot), even though there is really no such thing as current price during the trading day for a mutual fund, unlike with stocks & ETFs.

Further, every fund I've look at in Yahoo shows just below the price: "At Close: 8:06 AM EST" (or some slightly different time within a minute or two of that). This suggests that "current" daily price for a mutual fund is actually the NAV calculated the the previous night and should become the "historical" price for the current day.

I presume that the current price for stocks, ETFs, and ADRs shows the actual--or slightly delayed--time throughout the day (I didn't start early enough today to confirm), but after the market close, they all show, "At Close: 4:00 PM EST" with the current after-hours price & time just to the right.

Are the current versions of Quicken able to download quotes? If so, perhaps someone can compare the fund prices & dates that Quicken pulls in against those shown on the Numbers spreadsheet and Yahoo Finance web page.

I suppose I can add a condition to the spreadsheet so that IF date = TODAY, use STOCK instead of STOCKH. I need to make another change to the spreadsheet anyway, so I'll work on this later tonight.

> @dboltson said:
> Another thing to watch out for is possible mismatches, such as with Berkshire Hathaway, which Morningstar codes as BRK.B . . . but Quicken, to pull from their quotes server, uses BRKB (without the dot). But this is a "symbol" you easily edit in Quicken's "Setup Info" for your particular holding, depending on the source serving up your quotes.

Whoops, just like Morningstar, my TDAmeritrade brokerage also uses the dot in the Berkshire class B symbol. Yahoo Finance, however, uses a dash instead, which is the same character I'm using as a "null" symbol to filter out non-trading days and errors. I'll fix this tonight by choosing a different null symbol or a text string that can't possibly be part of a ticker symbol. In the meantime, the "alternate symbol" column can be used.

Numbers is "weird".
Here is FSCRX in Quicken (Note that Fidelity {the first prince entry sends the previous day's price with today's date at 3am, this comes from the and has no HIGH/LOW information, the others come from the quote server.  This last one will be replaced by the quote server when it comes in for the day)

Currently Numbers STOCK is reporting $28.60 and STOCKH (for  3/10/2021) is reporting $28.15, which is correct.  Where it is getting $28.60 I have no idea!

> @Chris_QPW said:
> Numbers is "weird".
> Here is FSCRX in Quicken (Note that Fidelity {the first prince entry sends the previous day's price with today's date at 3am, this comes from the and has no HIGH/LOW information, the others come from the quote server.  This last one will be replaced by the quote server when it comes in for the day)
>
>
> Currently Numbers STOCK is reporting $28.60 and STOCKH (for  3/10/2021) is reporting $28.15, which is correct.  Where it is getting $28.60 I have no idea!

In the old days (last week) Quicken would usually have all the NAVs ready just about now. 28.60 is today’s NAV. See https://search.yahoo.com/search?p=Fscrx&fr=yfp-t&ei=UTF-8&fp=1

DanaJ said:

And 28.15 is not today’s, it was yesterday’s NAV.

I think this refers to this:


I tried to explain, but it is "complicated".   Let me try again.

As I stated before Quicken gets it prices from three sources, the quote server, the financial institution, and manually entered.

Fidelity among some other financial institutions are very "poor" at sending prices for mutual funds.  For most financial institutions the  price information they send when you download transactions is pretty much up to date.  Not with Fidelity.  They don't update the price information they send to Quicken until about 3am Pacific time the next day.  And what's more they used the date that they updated on, not the date of the close.  So Fidelity sent 3/11/2021 $28.15 starting at 3am today, will continue to send that data until 3/12/2021 at 3am.  But the Quicken developers have "programmed around" this by when they get a price from their quote server it replaces the one that Fidelity sent.

At any rate as we have both noted, my timing was wrong for checking this out.  
Note when I tried using STOCKH and 3/11/2021 at that time it told me that 3/11/2021 was in the "future", and wouldn't allow me to use it.  And just tried it again, and it did the same.  So it seems it knows that it doesn't have the 3/11/2021 price yet.  Note I'm using 10.2 for iPadOS.

BTW if I was doing this for my use, I would go with @dboltson's method.  I like programming more than most, but when you find that you are doing a ton of "workarounds" is best just go back to "simple", with more steps.

I'm glad to find this thread. I also suddenly had a new failure mode with Quicken Mac 2007 Quotes on March 4. I've had a few things no longer work with this old Quicken version, but Quotes had still been going strong. I knew it was different this time, because the Quotes popup flashed by much faster than it usually does when there is some other temporary server issue. I didn't find anything searching online that day. Today I was already creating a numbers spreadsheet to get quotes when I did another search and found this thread!