Why is VGTSX giving me grief?

"Gary" wrote

I use Quicken H&B 2011. I have a Schwab Roth IRA which contains two mutual funds, Vanguard Total Stock Market Index (VTSMX) and Vanguard Total International Stock Index (VGTSX). The first of the two is fine, but VGTSX shows a price of 0. The actual quote for it is 13.06 on

12/31/11, but it has not gotten into Quicken via normal one-step updates.

I created a CSV file to get it into Quicken by importing. It contains entries such as:

"VGTSX", 13.06, "12/31/2011"

which is one of the acceptable formats according to the Quicken help file. When I imported the file into Quicken, the program says it read it and incorporated 800 historical (weekly) quotes, but the price in my Schwab holdings is still 0.

I'm getting very testy, frustrated, and angry. Any suggestions on how to get this going right?

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I believe you have run into the ongoing intermittent problem Intuit is having with one of their security price suppliers. The problem is supposed to have been solved, but there seem to be a few cases of it still popping up.

The problem causes the price history for one or more securities to become corrupted, and prices unusable for any involved security.

I believe sometimes you can delete the corruption by deleting all Quicken prices for the problem security, but other times the only recourse is to revert to a backup from before the problem occurred.

And unless/until the problem for that specific security gets solved, it's probably wise not to try to download prices for that security lest you recreate the problem.

A fairly simple way to delete all prices for one security in Quicken is to change its ticker symbol to some invalid ticker (not used by any other of your securities) and when Quicken asks what to do with the prices for the old ticker, tell Quicken to delete them. Then change the ticker back to the correct value.

There are a couple of other ways to recreate Quicken price history besides Quicken's historical price download and importing from a CSV file, should you need to do that. This would generally be useful for very old prices and for prices of securities that are not publicly available (such as municipal bonds).

Not to answer your question, but to ask you one of my own. Do you use H&B for your business or for your personal finances? Assuming the latter (which it sounds like if you have an IRA in it), can I ask you what are the advantages of H&B over regular Quicken?

None, Ken. I'll be switching back to Deluxe or Premier when I can.

OK, thanks. Glad to hear I haven't been making a mistake by not using H&B.

as john mentioned - sometimes the downloaded quotes for a security go awry.... You can click on the security and see the price history to keep tabs on when it went bad, and when it gets corrected. You can manually update the price history, but any Update Quotes for that symbol will overlay it. May last for a few days.

My problem has been corrected.

I called Quicken tech support. The very knowledgable technician (India?) told me to wipe out all price history for VGTSX and reload it. This fixed the problem! When I asked him "why?", he told me the file must have gotten corrupt and that is their way of correcting that.

Weirdly enough, the last couple of times I've bought a new version of Quicken, Quicken H&B was cheaper over at BJ's than the premier version at Staples, Best Buy, or Amazon. I have no idea why this has been so, but figured I might as well pay less for more functionality. YMMV.

Ken B.