Options trading

Hopeful bump.

Chad Neeper wrote in news:icu0dm$66b$1 @speranza.aioe.org:

Quicken absolutely sucks for any kind of trading that isn't "Buy X" followed strictly by "Sell X", where X is a listed U.S. stock.

Even then, I've had problems with things never quite being right (securities stay on the portfolio screen even though there's 0 shares owned, etc).

As far as correctly tracking shorts (which is what part of a covered call is), good luck. It's always been completely screwed up on all tax reports.

And also, good luck getting correct pricing (although this may have improved since they went to a better option symbology at the exchanges).

All in all, I'd say Quicken sucks at these kind of things.

On some of the options I have purchased it appears that I am now getting the correct pricing sometime after the close. However, any changes that I want to see during the day have to be entered manually.

Also one of my options has a current price of 0 (zero). If I try to enter 0, it won't except it and reverts to the previously entered price. The only way to force the issue is to enter .00000001 or some such. Didn't have this 0 problem in 2010 but it appeared to have started with

TomYoung wrote in news:25ff27d4-698f-4edd-829e- snipped-for-privacy@z26g2000prf.googlegroups.com:

Even if you do this (correctly enter ShtSell and CvrShrt), Quicken will often fail to line things up correctly for you.

Arnie Goetchius wrote in news:icuam7$t2h$1 @news.eternal-september.org:

Pricing on options is often problematic, for reasons that aren't really Quicken's fault.

For example: you buy a way OTM call on MSFT, (say a Jan'12 81 call). If the option doesn't trade on a given day, you'll keep getting the same closing price, over and over, even if MSFT has moved. What you really should be doing is marking to the quote (either the bid, the ask, or the mid, depending on what you really want to know).

Thanks to everyone for your responses.

(I typed a brief and mild rant about Intuit's annual window dressing changes rather than fleshing out feature areas...then deleted it as pointless. No competition equals no effort into this cash cow. I like QH&B, but I lost all respect for the company years ago.)

I think you should provide evidence for your claim that Quicken is a "cash cow".

Point taken, John! :-)

You're absolutely right. I have no evidence that Quicken is a "cash cow" for the manufacturer. This is just my feeling/opinion derived from my own personal observations that the core functionality of Quicken doesn't really seem to change or improve significantly from year to year. I've been using it for many, many years and it (anecdotally) appears to me that what changes the most between annual versions are largely bug-fixes and "window dressing"-type changes that are hyped up by the marketing department to be more significant than they really deserve to be to justify purchasing the upgrade.

Honestly, I _DO_ like Quicken H&B and I expect to continue to use it until I find something better that is not web-based. Each year with the annual version changes, however, I find myself disappointed that there is little or nothing that appears to me to be a particularly good reason to upgrade.

I've been using Q for at least twelve years now and I feel that it is as good a product now as it was then. A little better, granted...yes, but I feel that in more recent years especially, little has changed to justify the (just guessing) $300-$500 in upgrade costs. It seems as if it has almost turned into an annual subscription-based program.

So my comment about Q being a "cash cow" is simply derived from my feeling that the manufacturer is not putting a lot of money into developing any truly significant upgrades, but are instead simply keeping the devs in maintenance mode: changing the look/feel on occasion and making minor upgrades to help keep people buying the annual upgrade. Keeping development costs low while people continue to buy the annual upgrades keeps the money flowing. I presume it's good for the manufacturer, but frustrating for some consumers.

I feel that if there were any real competition to Q, then the manufacturer would be forced to protect their sales by putting more money (effort) into development. It's just business...I understand that...but disappointing for me as an end user, none-the-less.

(LOL! I guess this is the mild rant I had started to write but decided not to bother to finish. Lastly, while I occasionally find reading message threads that degenerate into this level of conversation...or worse...amusing, I've tried to explain myself as best I can and I don't plan to participate in this particular thread any further. Hopefully it doesn't stray too much further from the original topic. Thanks again to the respondents to my OP!)

I believe Quicken is Intuit's least profitable product; and I don't think it makes much of a profit at that. I think MS Money's demise demonstrates that the personal financial software market is not some large untapped gold mine.

Microsoft Money is barely gone, so I suspect it's too soon to draw any meaningful conclusions about the effect of the reduction in comptetion for Quicken. But my sense is that Quicken is a very mature product; significant changes, that do not cause a major increase in price, are hard to come by. And the type and degree of changes to Quicken seem to have changed very little during the 10 or so years I have used it; I'm not seeing any fewer, or less useful, improvements in recent versions. And in the last 3 or 4 years, I have seen much greater communication between Intuit developers and customers, which I believe is a good thing that will help make future versions of Quicken better than they otherwise would have been.

The shortage of meaningful competition for Quicken is at least something of an indicator, that it is not that easy to produce a better product that will make money. If a company with Microsoft's resources can't do it, it can't be that easy.

For many users - whatever the actual costs of the upgrades have been, those costs have not been just for product "upgrades": part of those costs paid for the benefit of being able to continue to download. And yes, a sort of built-in "subscription" charge. Another benefit of upgrading that has nothing to do with product features, is having a product that runs on the latest hardware and operating system, and without requiring operating system emulators or generic device drivers.

Although it turns me into a fibber because I stated I wouldn't, your comments deserve a response:

While I'm still not particularly interested in continuing the left-turn this thread has taken, your rebuttal was intelligent, well-composed and certainly brought up several points that should be considered. Thank you.

I do hope, however, that your first paragraph is off the mark. I hope there is a strong demand for personal financial software. Not only that, but I hope that demand keeps the software offline rather than web-based. Many good things come from anywhere online access. But personally, I'm not terribly inclined to trust that particular data to the cloud. (I expect I'm going to end up in the minority on this one in the long run.)