Why is Quicken booking unrealized gains for investment accounts?
Found at:
Quicken is not "booking unrealized gains"; therefore there is no meaningful answer to the op's "why".
What the original poster is calling "transactions" are not real Quicken transactions - they do not exist in the Quicken data base.
The op is looking at a Banking > Transaction report. While the Banking > Transaction report is capable of displaying unrealized gains, it does NOT do so by default; the report Customize dialog must specifically request that display by checking the "Include unrealized gains" option on the Advanced tab in the Banking > Transaction report Customize dialog.
And when the Banking > Transaction report does display unrealized gains, it does so by displaying a pseudo-transaction for every price change in the Quicken Price History for each security in the report (*). Those pseudo transaction exist NOWHERE in the Quicken data base: they only exist temporarily while the report is displayed ... only for the purpose of conveying the requested unrealized gain information.
Quicken has worked as noted above (and just as the original poster reports seeing) since at least Q2004. There is nothing new going on - other than the fact that apparently the op's Banking > Transaction report had its "Include unrealized gains" option checked without the op's knowledge (giving the op the benefit of the doubt). Upgrades to Quicken have been known for quite some time, on occasion, to improperly modify Quicken data (Saved report Customizations for example).
One of the first things I check in new Releases/New Versions, is report Customizations - looking for new Customize options. It also pays to take a spin through all Quicken's capabilities after at least some Upgrades, to learn what choices are available.
[(*) Note: this means that if there have been no security prices recorded for securities held in the account during the date range of the report, there will be no unrealized gains available or reported.] [NOTE: See also a Quicken Net Worth report. Choose a date range and an investment account that has security holdings during that date range. Double-click on the amount in a column for the investment account of interest and notice the resulting "transactions". Those are not real Quicken transactions any more than the ones appearing in the original poster's Banking > Transaction report. They are just a Quicken mechanism for conveying unrealized gain "activity" over time to the user.] [Last Community Post: August 11, 2021 @ 10:14 am]