Background: Valuing a TIPS Bond requires multiplying the market price by the current Inflation Factor ( a.k.a. Index Ratio) to give an inflation-adjusted price. The US Treasury quote server available in Fund Manager only gives the unadjusted market price, which means your TIPS holdings appear undervalued. This problem has been raised several times on these boards.
e.g. https://www.fundmanagersoftware.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=3461
Fund Manager can read prices from a text file so you could create a file after downloading both prices and inflation factors, but something more streamlined would be faster.
Fortunately Fidelity has a page showing inflation-adjusted TIPS prices and these can be downloaded and imported directly into Fund Manager. This is the simplest way I have found to update TIPS values. A Fidelity account is required to reach this page, but you do not need TIPS at Fidelity to access the prices.
Step 1 Downloading the Prices
- Login to Fidelity and go to News & Research -> Fixed Income, Bonds and CDs.
Click on the Bonds Tab, then the sub-heading TIPS (Secondary).
Click the button that says See 51 CUSIPs. This will list all the TIPS, including the Adjusted Bid Prices we need. Although the CUSIP id doesn’t show on screen it does get downloaded in the file. [To speed things up in future you can add this page to your browser bookmarks.]
Click Download Data to Spreadsheet and save the file locally where Fund Manager will be able to read it.
Step 2 Importing the Prices
- In FM use the Ctrl-E shortcut, or go to File->Import->Prices->Generic Import…
- Code: Select all
="SYMB",XX,XX,XX,XX,XX,XX,XX,XX,XX,XX,XX,XX,"NAV",XX,XX
Specify the date for the prices you downloaded.
For the first time (only) you must also specify the Input Format and the File to Import. These will be memorized for next time.
The Input Format should be:
(This requires that your TIPS investment properties in FM have the CUSIP id as their Symbol.) The only other field imported is the adjusted price in field 14. The XX tokens tell FM to ignore the other fields.
Click Import, and the prices will be updated for your TIPS in FM.