Update cached data from Schwab/other investment FIs more frequently [Edited]

Thank you, @Quicken Kristina !

Perhaps I should have reported it as a bug (?) (It used to work fine, so to me it is actually a bug).

Yes, I have seen that statement, @q_lurker, but with all due respect, I hope you don't mind that I do not agree with that. I have been using Quicken for 20+years and while it is not exactly the fastest at dealing with lots of transactions, it can very easily be sufficient to handle things. With minor tweaks it can be made to be rated good, even. Active day-trader scenario can just be looked at as a stress test on the software. All improvements made also help all other users. I am quite sure everyone expects a 'download initiated by a user' to fetch all up-to-date data. It is that fact that it does not that makes me want to say it is a bug. But, let's leave it at that.

I agree with you, though - from what I have seen, this is unlikely to get addressed. Sad.

This is my humble opinion (and I have been in the software industry for decades, with all of development, management and marketing hats on).

@Rocket J Squirrel , I am afraid there are far more important factors to consider when choosing a brokerage for day trading than whether they can do Direct Connect to Quicken. Certainly at least for me. I have Fidelity as well as Schwab, and, for reasons I do not want to go into here, I would never do active trading on Fidelity. Now that Schwab has ThinkOrSwim, I would not consider switching at all barring a total meltdown.

As @bmciance points out, Fidelity does not do real-time, but seems to update at end-of-day or beginning of day or midnight.

@Rick8 , I remember those fiasco days (months). Wish things to go back to how it was before that, but for now things have somewhat stabilized to a somewhat manageable degree. Except for this pain-in-the-[whatever] limitation on how often one can download. (I don't necessarily want 'download any time' but at least let us update a few times a day).

@Jim_Harman, thank you for the pointer to the other thread. I will read and connect to that as well. ( Update: that thread is closed now :-( )

@Chris_QPW I can think of only two things for the throttling. a) Preventing overload of Schwab servers or Intuit servers due to excessive data fetches by customers, and b) Preventing Denial-of-Service attacks on Schwab servers. Others can perhaps think of more reasons.

Schwab makes data available for download on their web servers all the time in real-time. So do other FIs, including Fidelity. However, trades are subject some 'final adjustments' at the end of the day, and this might be the reason some FIs such as Fidelity wait till the end of the day - so they can provide only the final data. Schwab also, in some cases, corrects the data at the end of the day - they simply replace the data. So it is possible to get duplicate entries for a given transaction. This does not happen often, though.

Let us assume that the overload concerns are valid. However, the current level of throttling is a HUGE overkill in my opinion. Most likely, IMO, they just pulled a number off the air with no real data on the load on the servers with different timeout numbers. IMHO, they could very easily reduce the cache timeout to something less than an hour, and they will notice no difference. (Personally I think even 10 minutes will be just fine.)

The change is such an easy one to make and requires little testing. It is definitely worth considering the change. Probably Intuit has to make the change. (We are all caught in this love trianglenow.)

Another way to implement this throttling would be to keep a counter of the number of downloads and limit it to a maximum of, say five or 10 per day. Requires more code change and testing.

Sometimes, in software development, one has to periodically give a higher priority to a change because it is a simple change or low risk change. Otherwise the overall quality will suffer - not from major issues, but a large number of minor issues. (Death by a thousand cuts.)

@Chris_QPW I agree with you about the policies.

I was merely pointing out that IF Schwab's concern was overload/DOS on Schwab's data servers, then those concerns apply to their web servers as well. There are other industry practices to mitigate the overload/DOS concerns internally, without telling your customers 'hey, access these pages only twice a day'.

Of course, we do not know where the restriction is coming from. Is it imposed by Schwab? Or a group of FIs? Or self-imposed by Intuit for whatever reason? Who knows?

All I can say is that I really doubt if anything bad will happen if they reduced the throttling to allowing once an hour or less. Possible, but doubtful. I just think they overkilled it. My opinion comes from having had a lot of experience dealing with software/system performance at a major company.