Q05P 1 yr return < 0 for a money market fund???

Hello, Stubby! You wrote on Mon, 24 Oct 2005 16:25:01 -0400:

S> I own Vanguard Prime Money Market fund. On the portfolio view the "Avg S> Annual Total Return (%) 1-Year" shows -2.78 . A money market fund S> pegs its NAV at $1 and I reinvest all dividends. Can anyone explain S> that?

Have you held the fund for less than one year? I remember reading somewhere in Quicken, that performance (in reports) may be skewed if you own shares for less than one year.

Regards, Margaret Wilson

Either there's a pricing error on the fund, or you're not entering the reinvested dividends properly. Run an Investment Performance report for the same period to see what Quicken considers to be the cash flows. If that still doesn't solve the problem for you, post back with more details on the transactions so we can determine the problem.

Thanks. I'm painfully aware of Quicken's "You have to hold it for a year and a day" bug, but that's not the problem. Although over the years, I've bought and sold other securities out of the money market fund.

I tracked it down to an excess contribution to an IRA, made in Dec 2004 and removed in Jan 2005. I put it in the Vanguard Money Market fund and had Vanguard do their excess contribution removal process from the same fund. Should be easy, right? $3500 in and $3500 out. Simple.

Well NOOOoooooo. The IRS has a different idea. They say you make contributions to/from the IRA *AS A WHOLE*, not a specific fund. Although a money market fund doesn't change NAV during the month in question, the other securities in the IRA did. So, they said my $3500 went down to $3419 and that's what they refunded.

That's fine but Quicken can't think about things that way. So that's why my money market fund appeared to have lost money during that period.

I'll bet the IRS and Quicken won't let me/us do the right thing to avoid this -- make every security be held by a separate IRA.