Quicken® 2010 For Dummies®

Chapter 14. Stocks and Bonds

In This Chapter

• Setting up a brokerage account

• Describing the securities in a brokerage account

• Transferring cash to and from a brokerage account

• Buying stocks and bonds from a brokerage account

• Recording income from securities held in a brokerage account

• Recording margin interest, miscellaneous income and expenses, and return of capital

• Updating securities prices

• Adjusting your brokerage cash balance

• Adjusting your brokerage account shares

After you understand how Quicken handles tax-deferred investments, working with a regular taxable brokerage account (and the extra complexity that such an account typically includes) is a snap.

Tip

If you haven't yet used Quicken for tax-deferred investment record keeping or read Chapter 13, I recommend you at least skim Chapter 13. That chapter provides some useful information about the fundamentals of investment record keeping with Quicken.

Setting Up a Brokerage Account

Setting up a brokerage account is similar to setting up a regular tax-deferred account. Because I describe this process in painstaking detail in Chapter 13, I don't repeat the discussion here.

The one bit of information that I will note is this: During the investment account setup process, when Quicken asks you what kind of account you're setting up, specify that you're setting up a standard brokerage account.

Recording your initial share balances

If you've already read or skimmed Chapter 13 (which talks about using Quicken to track tax-deferred investments), you ...