Investment Categories

You can't use "Buy" as a category in a transaction you enter. Buy is an action you do on an investment transaction, like this:



Quicken doesn't allow you to manually use investment categories, because they are calculated internally based on your transactions. 

Until recently, the only asset allocation was what you could see in the Portfolio view, and it used whatever allocations you selected for each security. The problem with this is that many investors have mutual funds and ETFs which have a mix of asset classes.

In version 6.3, Quicken introduced the Dashboard and its own asset allocation panel. In this view, Quicken is pulling in a drill-down breakdown of each security from their third-party data supplier (perhaps Morningstar?). This is a good thing. For securities which aren't 100% one asset class, having Quicken correctly calculate an asset class breakdown is a good step forward. So if you have a mutual fund or ETF which is 60% large caps stocks, 36% domestic bonds and 4% small cap stocks, instead of using whatever asset class you assigned for the security, Quicken is applying those percentages to your holdings in that fund. (From my understanding, going forward, every security which Quicken gets data for could be called "Asset Mixture", and it will correctly allocate the proper dollar amounts to the proper categories. The only reason you'd want to assign asset classes manually is for private securities or international securities for which Quicken can't download information.)

Unfortunately, with the 6.3 release, we're in an in-between state where the Dashboard asset allocation is doing the calculation based on the makeup of each security, but the Portfolio asset allocation is using just the asset class in each security's setup screen. That's why many securities are counting only as "Asset Mixture" in the Portfolio screen, without the drill-down to the makeup of the security's holdings. The good news is that the product manager has said they will change this in a future release so Portfolio is calculated the same as the Dashboard is now. The bad news is that for now, we have to live with the Portfolio view asset allocations not being very useful. The Dashboard asset allocation card is the more meaningful display of asset allocation until they fix this.