Download historical prices

The only thing you can control about historical price downloads is the overall time frame of the download.

Historical prices are designed to download: daily prices for the current month; weekly prices for the 11 months prior to that; and monthly prices prior to that.

If you see other prices in your price history, they came from a previous "Quote" download, a previous "Historical Price" download, a download of your holdings from your fi, a manual update of your price history, or an investment transaction that contained a price.

As far as I can tell, the price history lists in Quicken are for visual reference only, and the values do not automatically popluate any forms or functions, even where it would be very useful as in entering a buy transaction. So, if I get historical prices from other sources, is there any reason for me to enter them in the price history lists in Quicken.

The prices in your Quicken price history are used to value your securities: automatically.

If you want to know what your IBM stock was worth a year ago, you need a price/share in Quicken dated a year ago. If you want to see if the value of your Quicken holdings match the value of your holdings on your last brokerage statement, you need a price/share for each security held at the brokerage as of the date of that statement. If you want to see a graph of the change in the value of your holdings over time, you need price/share for the end of each period shown in the graph.

So I think the Quicken historical prices are fairly useful.

More about historical prices. I found a source of historical prices on Yahoo! Finance that is complete and can be downloaded as an Excel spreadsheet. Is there any way of getting that data into Quicken en masse instead of editing the Price History lists and entering individually? This would be for periods in the past for which data is not available thru Quicken because it will only get one value per week.

Yes. Quicken can import prices from a .csv file, if they are formatted according to Quicken specifications (which probably means you would need to modify the file you download from Yahoo).

Here are some examples of the .csv file formats that Quicken recognizes (they're from Q2002 Help, but I do not believe the allowable formats have changed):

ABC, 123.456

ABC, 123.456, 12/31/00

ABC 123.456 12/31/00

"ABC", 123.456, "12/31/00"

[I think that Quicken will also accept a 4 digit year in these files, but it's been a while since I tested that.]

I neglected to add a couple of notes.

1.) Put the .csv file in your root directory, and give it a very short name: you can not browse for it when you import, you have to key the fully qualified name. 2.) In case it wasn't clear, you must use the ticker symbol just as it appears in your Quicken data. 3.) I think Yahoo downloads a lot more "fields" than appear in my examples; I think you should plan to get rid of those fields, and that may be most easily accomplished by opening the downloaded file in Excel and deleting columns there. 4.) To import the .csv file prices in Quicken, you need to have the Portfolio tab open, then click File > Import > Prices

I neglected to add a couple of notes.

1.) Put the .csv file in your root directory, and give it a very short name: you can not browse for it when you import, you have to key the fully qualified name. 2.) In case it wasn't clear, you must use the ticker symbol just as it appears in your Quicken data. 3.) I think Yahoo downloads a lot more "fields" than appear in my examples; I think you should plan to get rid of those fields, and that may be most easily accomplished by opening the downloaded file in Excel and deleting columns there. 4.) To import the .csv file prices in Quicken, you need to have the Portfolio tab open, then click File > Import > Prices