u/felixmkz

I get a $0.01 credit that looks like it comes from a vendor that I have not dealt with for 2 years. I suspect someone is testing to see if the card is active. I lock the card and call Cap One. They say check with the vendor and see what they say. The vendor CS says they don't know anything about a one cent credit and verify no activity on my account in 2 years.

I call Cap One back today and report the problem again expecting them to issue a new card. The CS rep starts listing some dubious reasons why I might get a one cent credit from a historic vendor. I ask for a new card, they say just keep your card locked. I say I have a bunch of regular charges and they will be declined if the card is locked. The CS says unlock the card when you expect these charges?! I tell them I will unlock the card and report any fishy charges and the CS is fine with that.

Credit card companies used to take prompt action when you reported a potential fraud. Have things changed in the last 5 years? I have not had a fraudulent charge since around 2020.

I tried this feature today. I have used Monte Carlo many times in the past. The best free tool that is available IMHO is Firecalc. Vanguard used to offer a good tool, but it was radically simplified and not as useful.

The Quicken results are a lot more pessimistic than Firecalc, given the same inputs. One reason may be how they are doing Monte Carlo. The usual way like Firecalc is to take a historical sequence of market returns and choose different starting points to run each simulation. The sequence is always the same but the starting point changes. It looks like Quicken is taking historical returns and choosing randomly from this list to create different sequences. This is likely more pessimistic. The other way to do it is to randomly pick returns between historic market high and low, this is proven to be more pessimistic.

The explanation is that it is extremely unlikely that you would see 10 increases or decreases in a row but random selection will sometimes use that. Historically, the market might have 5 bad years in a row followed by a few good years, for example, after the great depression.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell sharply through the early Depression years, losing 17% in 1929, 34% in 1930, and a devastating 53% in 1931, followed by a further 23% drop in 1932, before rebounding 67% in 1933, gaining modestly at 4% in 1934, then surging 39% in 1935 and 25% in 1936, only to collapse again by 33% in 1937, recover 28% in 1938, and finally slip 3% in 1939.

Anyway, this is my initial comment on the new Quicken feature. Perhaps others have different analyses?