Price History

"Ken Blake" wrote

I'm using Quicken 2011 Premium, Release R 8 (20.1.8.6) under 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate. For the past couple of days, I've been having the following problem:

On the Portfolio Screen, when I click Quotes to update the prices of the securities in my portfolio, the info for the mutual fund "Permanent Portfolio" (PRPFX) doesn't update. If I then go to Price History to update it manually, the entire history for it, which used to be there, is gone. If I click New and enter a price for the day, neither the Price History dialog box nor the Portfolio get updated. Nothing happens.

Anyone know what might be wrong, and what, if anything, I can do to fix it?

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The problem's been around since at least April. See the following for some workarounds.

Thanks very much. The problem was new to me. I hadn't seen it before. I just followed their instructions,and I think it fixed the problem.

The problem may have been around for months, but I haven't seen it until today. My recent backups have good prices for the funds that now won't work.

The one fund that is a problem for me is the Fidelity Contra Fund (FCNTX). I changed the security in Quicken from FCNTX to FCNTX2, and told it to delete the prices, as instructed in their solution. I then changed it back to FCNTX. It still will not download prices from Intuit.

I used a recent backup and exported the prices to a CSV file. I then edited the file, and added the symbol.

The export from Quicken creates a file with Date, Price, High, and Low. The help text says that it wants Ticker, Price, and Date. I moved the data around to try to get what Quicken would accept. I tried to import that, but I get a message that Quicken found "No valid prices found to import". After much playing, I found that the file could not have tabs between fields, and the year has to be 2 digits. Wow! It is over a decade since that problem was supposed to be fixed.

Finally, it imported the data. It reported 2245 prices successfully update. I don't know where they were updated though, as the mutual fund still shows no prices in the history, and a current value of $0.00

If I'm missing something, I'd appreciate some help.

Jim

Rant follows....

This is all incredibly sloppy for a company that is handling so many peoples financial data. Apart from the fact that they screwed up customers financial data, their exported data doesn't match their imported data format, they are still suffering from Y2K problems, and they don't seem able to update the security prices even when they report success. Add, to that, the problem has existed for months! These guys should be forced to wear clown costumes!

"Jim H" wrote The one fund that is a problem for me is the Fidelity Contra Fund (FCNTX). I changed the security in Quicken from FCNTX to FCNTX2, and told it to delete the prices, as instructed in their solution. I then changed it back to FCNTX. It still will not download prices from Intuit.

I used a recent backup and exported the prices to a CSV file. I then edited the file, and added the symbol.

The export from Quicken creates a file with Date, Price, High, and Low. The help text says that it wants Ticker, Price, and Date. I moved the data around to try to get what Quicken would accept. I tried to import that, but I get a message that Quicken found "No valid prices found to import". After much playing, I found that the file could not have tabs between fields, and the year has to be 2 digits. Wow! It is over a decade since that problem was supposed to be fixed.

Finally, it imported the data. It reported 2245 prices successfully update. I don't know where they were updated though, as the mutual fund still shows no prices in the history, and a current value of $0.00

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As I recall, the workarounds provided were only to recover lost prices; they weren't intended (and have no way) to fix the download part of the problem. I think the idea is to exclude the securities that are experiencing the problem from price downloads until the problem is fixed.

A properly formatted CSV file shouldn't contain any tab characters: the letters CSV stand for Comma Separated Values, so the delimiters should be commas, not tabs. Possibly when you were editing the price data, the editor/word processor you were using left some unwanted characters in the file. I think Notepad can be safely used for such editing.

I'm not sure what the cause of your import problem with 4 digit years was: I have no problem importing prices with 4 digit years. I can't remember when (or whether) I was ever unable to have 4 digit years in a CSV price file.

If you tried another download of prices for FCNTX after clearing the bad prices, you most likely made it, once again, impossible for Quicken to store any prices for that security. Maybe that's what happened to your 2245 imported prices (lost in the bit-bucket). Try once again, deleting all the FCNTX prices, then import the CSV file ... without trying to download any prices for FCNTX.

CSV does stand for comma separated values. But, even Quicken can handle two spaces as the delimiter. Excel can handle tabs, spaces, commas, semicolon, or several other types of characters.

I edited the file down to one line, with data for just one date. I took out all of the tabs, and left the year as 4 digits. Quicken 2011 could not import it. I edited the year down to 2 digits and it was able to read the file, and Quicken reported success. I then made the same change to the entire file with 2245 dates, and Quicken reported success importing that. But, the security still did not have any prices in its history.

I gave up on the recovery idea, and used yesterday's backup. It still had all of the prices. I just lost a few hand entered transactions. The subsequent download did not corrupt the data, as the previous one had. I'll have to recreate the lost manual entries later, but for now, everything is working.