A quick account simply provides a list of current portfolio positions. You don’t need transaction or price history to create quick accounts: you enter current positions and then can use our various tools to analyze the account. It is useful for keeping track of a list of securities quickly and easily. Quick accounts do not allow you to effectively track past portfolio performance, so all return figures and performance graphs for these portfolios are hypothetical. However, you can use Portfolio X-Ray and other tools that require only current account positions.
A transactional account provides full-fledged account tracking—it allows you to input sales, purchases, dividends, and share splits to track accounts through time. These accounts are a little more work to create and maintain, but the performance figures reflect the account’s transaction history. The benefit to transactional accounts is that returns, performance graphs, and other figures reflect the actual account behavior.