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

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!!

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

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.

Regards,

John

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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

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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.