New Info - Unreliable Data Quotes / No Server - Work around

Jan 18, 2008 15 Replies

This is a band aide for a major Intuit disconnect for Quicken customers who use the download quotes services. I do not feel the workaround below should be necessary, rather Intuit should fix the issue.



Those of you in this forum who¡¦ve had download issues; you are not alone in stating such. Please take time to view this website for others with the same experiences.



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I found the following at the above website and thought I¡¦d share it with the forum. Some modifications and additions have been made. However, the instructions below will download your price quotes, 100% of the time.



The instructions are VERY GRANULAR as its being written for multiple levels of computer expertise. The actual process, once learned should not take long. Maybe two minutes.



CAUTION: The following will NOT enter the stock¡¦s daily high, low, or volume. Just the day¡¦s quote for the security, into your Quicken database.



NOTE: You must have Microsoft Excel for this process. (I¡¦m not sure if other spreadsheet software will work ¡V not tried. However, if other software is tried, it must be able to store the file in a Comma Delimited extension. Or ¡§.csv¡¨


  1. You will need to do this one time only.

- Set up a Yahoo Financial account (this is free)



- Create/edit your Yahoo Financial account with the security symbols you track with Quicken.



- If you already have a Yahoo Financial account, you may want to create a special Quicken portfolio for convenience.



- NOTE: should you purchase new stocks not listed above, you will need to edit your Yahoo Financial portfolio to include the new security.


  1. Important ¡V BACKUP your current Quicken database file prior to beginning.

- This is recommended at least for now, until you become comfortable with the process.


  1. Finding your Quicken data files

- From ¡§Start¡¨ go to ¡§Search¡¨ and click



- Go to ¡§All files and folders¡¨ and click



- In the ¡§All or part of the file name:¡¨ box enter ¡§*.qdf¡¨ (do not enter the quotes)



- Click on the ¡§Search¡¨ box


- You¡¦ll receive a list of Quicken data files. The default is ¡§MY_DATA.QDF¡¨



- To find the rest of the associated files with database, go back and do another search. This time in the ¡§All or part of the filename:¡¨ box, enter the info to the LEFT of the period from the first search then period, and asterisk.



- EXAMPLE: You would enter the following ¡§MY_DATA.*¡¨ without the quotes.



- Click on the ¡§Search¡¨ box.


- The list of files returned from the ¡§Search¡¨ are the files you need to save/backup. Yes, you can rely on the files in the Backup folder if you¡¦d like to, however, this is a much safer and quicker way to save and restore your database files.


  1. Extracting data from your Yahoo Financial Portfolio

- Bring up the portfolio you created in step 1, above.



- Go down the display to the right hand corner, just below the last quote.



- You will see, ¡§Download Spreadsheet¡¨, click



- You¡¦ll be asked to ¡§Open¡¨, ¡§Save¡¨ or ¡§Cancel¡¨. I prefer to ¡§Save¡¨ the file. So, click on ¡§Save¡¨.



- I use the default save name of ¡§quotes.csv¡¨. The default store location/folder is C:\


  1. Preparing the .csv file for import to Quicken

- Open your saved file from step 4



- You¡¦ll see columns A thru I are populated for each security from the Yahoo portfolio. (Depending on the download in step 4, some securities may have ¡§N/A¡¨ listed in columns F thru I. The price import will still work.)



- Delete columns C thru I



- Place mouse pointer on column letter C.



- Click and hold the button down.



- Slide the mouse pointer to Column I



- Columns C thru I should be highlighted



- Hit the ¡§delete¡¨ key on your keyboard



- Only Columns A and B should remain, containing security symbol and price.



- NOTE: I tried deleting all columns except A, B, and the last three, which contained the high, low, and volume for the security. This process would still, only load the price from column B.


- Format column ¡§B¡¨



- with the mouse pointer click on column B.



- Column B should now be highlighted



- Right click the mouse



- Go to ¡§Format Cells¡¨ and click



- Select ¡§Number¡¨



- Change ¡§Decimal places:¡¨ from 2 to 4



- Click ¡§OK¡¨


- Save the file. I like using a separate name to save it, such as the day¡¦s date



- 011808.csv in C:\


- IMPORTANT: Remember the location of the file and its name. It will be needed in step 6. Also, the FILE MUST BE CLOSED to import to Quicken.



  1. Importing into your Quicken database

- Open Quicken



- Down the left side, go to ¡§Investing Center¡¨ and click



- Go to the Menu bar and click on ¡§File¡¨



- Go to ¡§Import¡¨ „³ ¡§Import Prices¡¨ and click



- In the ¡§File¡¨ box, enter the location where you stored your file from step 5. The total path must be entered.



- EXAMPLE: ¡§C:\011808.CSV¡¨ without the quotes



- Click ¡§OK¡¨



Your new prices should now be displayed in your ¡§Investing Center¡¨



If you see by a security for its ¡§Quote/Price¡¨ an ¡¥est.¡¦, the price was not entered. The cause may be it wasn¡¦t listed in your Yahoo Financial portfolio. (Simply edit the portfolio.) Or, you may have forgotten to format Column B in step 5 to ¡§Numbers¡¨ and change decimal places to 4.



Happy Investing!!


This is a "band aide" [sic]? you don't need. It's much more work than you need to put yourself through ... assuming you don't think you can use Quicken for "day trading" (in which case, you are using the wrong product).

Look for a free product called "NetStock" (Google is your friend). Install Netstock and - when you are ready to import prices to Quicken - tell it to create the ".csv" file you need to import prices into Quicken.

[NetStock has a small problem: it creates files to import into Quicken that always have "today's" date: just make sure that all of "today's prices are final (including mutual fund prices) ... not a problem if you just want "today's" prices.] [If you like the basic concept; you can, and should, tell the developer of NetStock to offer the option to use the date of the prices that Netstock gets from its price source ... which is "correct" about 99.99% percent of the time.]

John,

Thank you for your thoughts. I'm sure you are totally pleased with your Quicken experience and very knowledgeable about the s/w.

The post was written for those who have/had problems downloading quotes. Nothing more, nothing less. The length of the message was due to the audience (software knowledge level), not the degree of difficultly to perform the process. It took a grand total of @ 2 minutes to download all of my securities quotes this evening at 6 PM. And the import prices were correct. (Hmm, how many day traders are really trading at 6 PM on a Friday evening?) But thank you for your suggestion about 'Netstock'.

This is nothing more than information I came across and passed on to the forum. Should anyone wish to use it, fine. If not, no problem.

Why someone uses this product and for what reason is not the question! Why the product is not performing as advertised, is! Seems you spend a lot of time reading posts in this forum - even get an accolade every now and then - good job. Not all posts are meant to be universal, and this is not one.

Happy Downloading Data!!

I've download the NetStock s/w from

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and will evalutate it's performance on Saturday and report back my findings to the forum.

Film at 11

NetStock works just fine - I use it to import quotes for an older version of Quicken that no longer performs online quotes. Look for it at

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Thanks for the tip. It's a relatively painless work around for Intuit's gross incompetence.

Watch out also for prices provided before the current day's mutual fund prices are available.

The screen will tell you the actual day that the quotes were based on.

But the .csv file will always have today's date, regardless of the date shown in the display.

I'd suggest only creating the .csv file on non-holiday weekdays after mutual fund prices are available for the day.

Downloaded NetStock version 1.74.001. It worked well, but a couple of areas I had to tweak.

As several have mentioned, the date, is the date of the NetStock export. As I was doing it over the weekend, I simply went in and did an "Edit" / "Replace" to change the date on the prices.txt file to reflect, Friday - 1/18/2008.

A second area was one security had a post date of July 11, 2008. I found the same issue when using the other process. It was quickly resolved by going into NetStock, Settings, Data Preferences, and changing Number Formats from 2 to 4.

There has been excellent dialogue in the posts. Either process will work to alleviate the quote issues we've all suffered with. The one item I'm still looking at is whether, after using the process, IF the quote server is working, will the quotes be updated to show, high, low, and volume for last Friday.

Sorry I'm a bit late joining the discussion, but hopefully the information below will be of use to some Quicken users who prepare their own files of stock prices for import into Quicken, and who want High, Low, and Volume as well as Last price.

The link provided leads to an old newsgroup posting with details of the .csv file structure to enable importing not only Closing (Last) Price for a security, but also High, Low, and Volume.

I have tried it and it works well, but for some as yet undiscovered reason Volumes greater than 20 million aren't imported.

Note also that if your date format is dd/mm/yyyy (rather than mm/dd/yyyy as in the post), the format in the post can be changed accordingly.

It's fairly easy to set up an Excel macro to output a .csv file in the required format, using either Yahoo or NetStock data as input.

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Regards,

John

Thank you John!

I'm not an 'awk' s/w person - really a hardware geek. But anyway, I used NetStock, the Mega file export, and did some editing in Excel. I was able to load price, high, and low as you mentioned. Yes, the volume, I haven't been able to resolve yet. But this is a WORKAROUND for a falling golden goose. It is truly sad!

My other thought was whether a 'good' Quicken 'download' would take care of the above. Since it (Quicken download) hasn't worked since Thursday, I don't have a clue - YET.

What I really think is we need to get together a group of unsatisfied Quicken users and develope a product that will solve issues for both Intuit and Money users.

Whatcha think?

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G'day,

Pleased it worked for you - more or less! Like I said, the Volume issue can be a pain but for me (in Oz) it's not usually too much of an issue (volumes of most stocks seldom over 20 million).

From my experience, I *think* a 'good' Quicken download will add the latest day's data and overwrite the previous four days data. But, I'm using Quicken in Oz and your mileage (presuming you're in the US) may vary.

I'm not an 'awk' person either, but if you have some knowledge of Excel it's relatively easy to write (even with the help of the macro recorder) a macro to do the job.

As for your suggestion regarding developing a new product - sorry to be a wet blanket, but in a word - NO.

If MS and Intuit can't get it right, I doubt that we could. I don't have programming skills, and even if I did it would be an absolutely HUGE task to design a program like either Money or Quicken from scratch.

Regards,

John

[snip]

[snip]

NetStock may be a great problem to use as a workaround - if you're using a Windows machine. I'm using a Mac. guess I'm screwed. Besides, one reason I've used Quicken for Max all these years is to take advantage of being able to down load daily stock and mutual fund prices.

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