Avg Annual Returen (%) YTD

Quicken does not calculate Average Annual Return (%) YTD unless the security is held in an account on January first and there aren't any placeholders preventing Quicken from determining cost.

---snippage--- First, the link in the previous post is the right place to go. But, just to make sure this thread looks semi-complete:

Quicken will refuse to calculate the IRR unless it has the costs and shares associated with _all_ the buys, sells, dividends, capital gains, and so on.

In my experience, a Placeholder is generated by Quicken when the share balance of your financial instrument du jour at your financial institution doesn't match Quicken's balance. When that happens (and it may have happened quite some time ago when a user was madly clicking on One Too Many Yes/No pop-ups), Quicken will put in an adjustment in the register for the share balance, with an "Unknown" on how much those shares cost.

There's options to turn off the viewing of the placeholders in the off-chance that one doesn't care; this can lead to considerable confusion when one >does< care. :)

And, in this case, when one is trying to get an IRR report, Quicken isn't going to do it, since throwing a random unknown number into the IRR equation gives one a garbage-in, garbage-out situation.

Most of the time, I get placeholders for two situations:

1. The financial institution insists on reporting share balances to the thousandth of a share; but the transactions downloaded from the financial institution have digits in the share balance of 0.000nnn variety. After enough additions and subtractions of those 0.000nnn numbers Quicken, which has been adding the numbers legitimately, ends up being off in the share balance from the F.I.. Solution: Go to an old transaction, adjust the number of shares bought or sold in the correct direction, allow Quicken to change the price, and the Placeholder will go to zero shares in error.
2. The User neglects to download all the transactions when they occur, or maybe enters a transaction manually, with the wrong numbers. In this case it's more-or-less the user's fault; it's like putting .39 in the checking register when the amount was really .45. Solution: In this case, find the faulty/missing transaction and correct/get it in there. The Placeholder will zero out and one can then do IRR reports.

KBeck

Getting past that problem...I just sold one of the stocks I have. The broker sold 6+ shares more than I had recorded in Quicken. I went to "adjust shares" to adjust from 299+ to 303+ and Quicken added 540+ shares back in October in a placeholder. It shows I have 839+ shares that I sold when I actually sold 303+ shares. Cash balance was wrong for at least 3 months I did a restore to get back to where I was before "adjusting shares" and used "add shares" to get the balance correct before I recorded the sell transaction. Can you, or anyone, explain why adjusting the share count goes back months and why it adds enormous share counts when it adjusts the count? BTW Win7 64x Quicken H&B 2017 R3 (Build 26.1.3.4) R. Wink

"Adjust shares" is used to insert a placeholder entry in a transaction list specifying the number of shares of a security held in an account on a date.

If you haven't already, you may want to review:

--- Snippage---

Well, got no clue as to why Quicken went beserk. However, there have been notable cases where the databases inside of Quicken got out of whack, internally. This is why Quicken has File->File Operations->Validate and Repair in the menus. Warning: Don't run that stuff, especially the deep-down Super Validate (see the help) unless you run a backup, first, and maybe even put that backup in a safe place, like a USB drive, before you do anything dramatic.

I've run the above from time to time. No question: Over a period of years, conversions from one version of Quicken to another, and random abrupt power-off shutdowns, errors do accumulate. After running the validate (and especially the super validate) you may end up with placeholders and such. Don't freak out: Just go fix the problems, one at a time. Nicely, Quicken will generate a report after the Validate. It's a good idea to print out the report before digging into the fixes. If things get really horrid Quicken provides a for-pay, "We'll fix your file for you" service, but I've never had it get quite to the point where I've wanted to do that.

Second: When you get an error like this where the wrong number of shares went into a transaction, >don't do Adjust Shares

Problem is,,,I didn't do a transaction. I sold the stock and got an email conformation from the broker. Rather than show that I had sold short, I was fixing the share count before doing the sell transction. I used 12/26/16 for the date for the "adjust shares" and made the correct number of shares at 303+. Then I put the sell transaction in with the sell date of 12/17/16. Quicken told me I didn't have any shares to sell. Looking in the registry for the account, Quicken had added shares to make the total

On 1/1/2017 1:28 PM, rwwink wrote: > Problem is,,,I didn't do a transaction. I sold the stock and got an > email conformation from the broker. Rather than show that I had sold > short, I was fixing the share count before doing the sell transction. > I used 12/26/16 for the date for the "adjust shares" and made the > correct number of shares at 303+. Then I put the sell transaction in > with the sell date of 12/17/16. > Quicken told me I didn't have any shares to sell. Looking in the > registry for the account, Quicken had added shares to make the total > 839 and then sold all of them without adding any cash to the > register...stocks gone and the money in limbo somewhere. > Backup/restore fixed the register and then a "0" dollar purchase of > the added shares got things going again. > I will try the validate command to see if it finds anything > R. Wink

Mr. Wink: Before I reply, a note: On Usenet, it's common to reply to previous comments at the _bottom_ of the thread. A lot of newsreaders seem to put the composing cursor at the top of the file, leading to people having to reassemble things in their heads. It's kind of like changing tense five times in a paragraph: People will eventually figure out what one is talking about, but it's the equivalent of making chalk scratching noises on the blackboard. :)

Going back to the issue: Sounds like you managed to confuse whatever version of Quicken you were using at the time. I don't do much stock trading, but I just checked: Quicken does have a transaction type of "Short Sale" where, presumably, the correct entries go into the correct places.

Since all the fun kicked in towards the end of 2016, I presume that this means that you don't have a zillion transactions before Quicken barfed and died. My suggestion: Write down all the transactions in the correct order on a piece of paper. Then, delete all the transactions from

KBeck