The "1" I put by my reply was intended to indicate that my answer was for
your first question which has nothing to do with spinoffs. Also, I was
referring to the results I get in the performance reports, not in the
portfolio.

"jeff" wrote:

- quote -

To add insult to injury the support guy I talked with was no stranger to the
problem- said its been around for a long time... and so far ignored!

Think I'll look at UltraSoft's MoneyLink. I have no problem with excel so
this may be an answer. Thanks for the info!

"Myrna Larson" wrote:

- quote -

From my point of view, it's even worse! We had investments in municipal income
trusts: the trust buys a basket of bonds with various maturity dates, then
sells shares to investors. The investor gets monthly interest payments, and
when a bond matures, principal is returned to the investors. Money's
calculation of absolute dollar return and % return are correct. BUT... when it
comes to annualized return, they ignore the return of principal transactions,
so the investment shows, e.g. POSITIVE dollar and percent return, but NEGATIVE
annualized return -- an absolute absurdity! I reported this for at least 3-4
years, and nobody at MS is interested in fixing it.

My solution was to use UltraSoft's MoneyLink Excel add-in to pull the data
into an Excel worksheet and do my own calculations. But if you don't use
Excel, this probably isn't of much help to you.


On Sun, 21 Oct 2007 05:33:00 -0700, jeff <jeff[at]discussions.microsoft.comwrote:

- quote -

Hi,

The difficulty is- no matter which report- Money uses the incorrect date for
its calculation. I.E. I have Altriain in an account. Altria had a spin off
earlier this year. If I run the "Performance by Type" report from 01/01/01
to the day before the spin off I get 2.38% Rate of Return and 11.31% Annual
Return. The figures change respectively to 10.90% and 56.79% if I run the
same report from 01/01/07 to the spin off date- one day later.

Another example. If I change the date on the Portfolio Manager screen to the
day before the spin off, the account I have Altria in shows an Ann. Ret of
71.2%. Add one more day (date of the spin off) and the Ann. Ret is now
1284.4%.

Unfortunately, I have not found any performance figures correct throughout
Money if the calculations contain an investment that has a spin off or any
other action that results in a changed date.

What bothers me is the correct dates are still available, just not used!! I
have pointed the problem out to MS for several years now and still no
resolution so I'm looking for a work around.

"Wally" wrote:

- quote -

1. You can get around this by creating a performance report that is not
grouped by account. This seems to give an accurate performance figure.
Also, if you give the date range equivalent to the time that an investment
was in a particular account, it will give the correct performance figures for
that date range even if your report is grouped by account.

"jeff" wrote:

- quote -

After years of pointing out ongoing inconsistencies to MS with Money's
performance reporting I'm ready to give up!

1- Move an investment from one account to another and money uses the move
date, not the purchase date, to calculate performance returns.

2- Spin offs use the spin off date, not purchase date, to calculate
performance returns. Think the same problem with a merger.

3- Still haven't figured out what the consolidated account performance
figures mean.

4- No way to input wrap fee costs to an account to calculate net performance
returns.

5- No calculation regarding commission costs to determine Brokerage cost
impact on overall returns.

6- Money Market/Cash- ? Performance not calculated if MM returns are not
considered from an investment even though there are dividends/interest.


The good news is the $ calculations seem to be accurate, but how do you use
any of the performance reporting to compare performance to indices or any of
the other performance benchmarks publically available?

I’m not sure Quicken does anything different. I’m trying to find out if
others have the same problem and if there are any workarounds that get past
the issues.


Comments?