Q11 R8 Lost some (but not all) stock price histories when I updated stock

"Mark" wrote

First the basics: I am running Q11 R8 (20.1.8.6) under Windows XP via VMFusion v.2.0 (on a 2Ghz Core Duo 2 iMac)

Tonight when I updated the prices of my stock portfolio in Quicken, something odd happened: I lost the price histories of a few selected mutual funds. Not all of my couple of dozen funds, just maybe a half- dozen or so, from a couple of different fund families.

I've searched this board for similar situations and while I came across some post from 2004 and earlier in which entire price histories were corrupted, but did not see anything quite like this, where only a few prices histories vanished.

I have tried editing the price histories and adding today's value in the "edit price history" tab, but the program does not take it. Also I cannot type in today's value into the appropriate box in the main portfolio view. When I tried that, the numbers did not appear and the box remained blank.

I have tried validating the file; that did nothing. I have also tried renaming the QPH file and then updating the stock prices again, as one of the 2004 posts suggested, also to no effect.

Another odd thing: While the price history for the affected mutual funds appears empty, when I go into the register view and look up old transaction, all of the information is there.

I've been using Quicken more than 20 years, going all the way back to Quicken 5 and DOS, and I've never had anything like this happen before. Any suggestions?

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It's an ongoing problem, first reported back around April 2011.

The prices for certain securities (I think it's almost always mutual funds) get corrupted ... caused by Intuit's price supplier sending corrupted prices and Intuit not expecting that and not screening those corrupted prices out. The only way to workaround the problem is to delete those prices (simplest way is to change the Quicken ticker to a dummy ticker, tell Quicken to delete the prices for the original ticker, then change the ticker back to the correct value).

Some users will be able to recover the prices they need from a Quicken historical price download. Others will need to consider alternatives. You can post back if you need an alternative.

There is no current way to prevent the problem from recurring (though Intuit has said they have added code to Q2012 to try to prevent the problem in that version ... it's not clear whether that code is complete and working correctly).

If you are having the problem with mm funds, you should stop downloading prices for them ... you don't need to download mm fund prices anyway. If you have the problem with non-mm fund securities, you might still consider not downloading those prices via Quicken. You can use Netstock (free download, Google for it) to get current prices, output the prices from Netstock to a CSV file and import that CSV file into Quicken. [There's a caveat for Netstock: make sure the mutual fund prices are for the day in question, if you plan to import them to Quicken.]

[Prices in Quicken transactions are "stored" in the transactions; they remain in those transactions even if all your price history is deleted. Those "transaction" prices are not involved with this problem.]

"Mark" wrote

You have to get rid of the corrupted prices first.

The process is simple, and obvious once you actually do it.

Edit the security in your Quicken Security List. Change the ticker symbol to any non-existent symbol not already in your Quicken Security List ("xxxxx", for example). Quicken will ask what you want to do with the prices for the old ticker (VTSAX): tell Quicken to delete those prices. Once the ticker has been changed and the prices deleted, change the ticker back to its correct value.

Backup first.

In October, I had the same problem, but this procedure did not work for me. Even after going through these steps I was not able to import the prices for the failed security. It appeared to work, but no prices were restored. I was also not able to enter prices manually for that security. The only thing that did work was to go back to a backup from before the problem occurred.

I think that Quicken had crashed during a previous download, which corrupted the price history.