options to limit price downloads/updates

[tommcg]

Hi, Mark. I recently ran across some corrupt/erroneous historical price entries that caused some valuation graphs to go wild. I assume the bad prices got downloaded from one of the historical servers at some point in the past. In the course of cleaning up all my price histories I noticed many of my investments had prices before any shares were purchased (probably because I downloaded historical prices from my earliest portfolio transaction date when I started with FM). I also found many prices were continuing to be downloaded after an investment was completely sold (until I manually edit investment properties and turn off internet price retrieve for that investment).

For my purposes, I don't need or want prices stored for dates that I don't own an investment. It would be nice if there was an FM global option to NOT download historical prices for dates that investments are not owned (before first transaction or after last transaction resulting in zero shares). Also, for daily price updates, I don't want to retrieve prices for investments with zero shares.

Other price retrieve features that would be useful are to NOT download/update historical prices that I already have (both to save download time and to avoid overwriting manually entered prices), warn or ignore downloaded prices that are wildly different than previous price for same investment (I had some erroneous prices downloaded that were several hundred million $ per share).

If not global options, then perhaps just on the historical price download dialog that prompts for date range, a check box to download historical prices only for dates that shares are owned within the date range, and another check box to not update prices for dates that already have prices.

Thanks.

[Mark]

Hi tommcg,

Thanks for the feedback. Those ideas do sound like useful options to add, especially for the historical servers.

A couple related tips in case you weren't aware...

1) You can use "File / File Operations / Hide Sold Investments..." to turn hide as well as turn off the option to retrieve prices for securities you no longer own.

2) If you create a new investment and want to get historical prices for just that investment, you can right mouse click on it, and choose "Retrieve Selected Historical Prices". This will only update the selected investments, instead of updating everything which is what happens when you use the toolbar or main menu commands.

[tommcg]

Thanks, Mark. The "Hide Sold Investments" option to turn off retrieve is a one-time thing, not an always-on thing, so I still have a manual step after selling an investment to either turn off price retrieve, or run the "Hide Sold Investments" wizard. I prefer not to hide sold investments anyway as that can lead to weird totals in reports, so I move all my sold investments to a "Closed" sub-portfolio so that my return rates for the parent portfolio still reflect the closed investments.

The single investment price history retrieve is very useful, but requires that you know the first and last transaction dates before opening the retrieve dialog. Also, it overwrites all prices in the date range with the ones retrieved. As I've found several historical price errors on yahoo that I've manually fixed, I prefer that historical retrieve not overwrite what I've manually set as correct with what yahoo has incorrect in its history. Of course that could go either way, meaning newly retrieved price history might be more accurate than a previous erroneous download, hence the desire for an option whether or not I want to overwrite prices (I could always delete all prices and then re-fetch if I wanted to overwrite, but I cannot currently retrieve only the missing prices).

Thanks.

[Mark]

Hi tommcg,

Thanks, I appreciate these points. I just wanted to make sure you were aware of some options currently available. I do agree it would be beneficial to make these new retrieve options available in a future update.