Introducing myself

[Charles Day]

On Jan 3, 2008 8:59 AM, Andrew Sackville-West <andrew at swclan.homelinux.org>
wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 03, 2008 at 11:50:08AM +0000, Mark Carter wrote:
> >
> > My interest lies primarily in the advanced portfolio, and I've got
> some personal itches to scratch. The module alone is about the size of
> my entire python finance package, so the prospect of dipping into
> somethign completely new is fairly daunting. I noticed that someone is
> already working on the advanced portfolio, although not in the areas
> that currently interest me.
>

I'd have to say that portfolio reports and graphs are really where my
interest lies too. So far I've been actively shoring up the QIF importer, as
it's a still a major hurdle to getting me off of Quicken and on to GnuCash.
But assuming I can get past the QIF importer, then the next hurdle for me is
to see portfolio reports that are at least equal (and preferably much
better) to what Quicken offers.

The advanced portfolio report is frankly a pretty broken concept in
> gnucash right now. THe report does a fairly good job, now, I think, at
> what it's supposed to do, but what its supposed to do is not really
> very useful. It does, however, now have some useful bits of code in it
> that I intend to factor out into a "portfolio utilities"
> library. Those functions could then be called by any number of reports
> to build different views of the portfolio.
>
> Interesting things that I think it would provide: cost-basis at date,
> cumulative money invested at date, realized gains to date, maybe
> deltas of all those (date range) etc.
>
> The primary motivation for that is to:
>
> 1. shorten up the advanced portfolio report itself]
> 2. make it easy to write a portfolio performance report with a
> specifiable date range.
> 3. other reports like you've suggested below.
>
> >
> > The sort of things that I have in mind for enhancement are:
> > * showing the perfomance of mutual funds and share protfolio
> > separately, and in aggregate
>
> I'm not sure what you mean by this. You can easily select which
> accounts go into the report and then save that modified report...
>

I'm guessing what he means is that performance of these different types of
securities (mutual fund, shares) ought to be viewable both separately - and
the method you describe should work, though it would be fiddly for frequent
traders - and together on a combined report (perhaps with subtotals by
security type).  In my mind I'd like to see securities be able to be
categorized and reported on by a number of different criteria: not just the
type of security, but its asset class, exchange, country, and others.  As an
example, Quicken offers to automatically download each security's asset
class (large-cap, mid-cap, etc) and then does some reporting around that.
The more information GnuCash knows about each security, the more that
reporting can slice/dice.


> > * showing the performance against a market index
>
> can we get quotes for market indexes? I'm sure we can, but don't
> know. The trick would be to get an interface into the pricing db and
> then track it's price over time alongside the actual accounts. It
> should be fairly simple provided there is data on the market
> index. This would require the user to create the index in the price
> editor and get quotes for it.
>

I'd love to see this generalized so that the performance of a security or
group of securities can compared with any other security, whether that be an
index, a currency, gold, shares of company XYZ, whatever. Another feature
that would be useful to me is to see performance reported in terms of
another security. For example, performance could be reported in terms of
ounces of gold, shares of XYZ, or any other security.  The last few years'
"bull market" in US stocks looks like a complete illusion when you report
the dow in terms of gold. The fact that users have the opportunity to add
these types of features themselves is one of GnuCash's key attractions.

(Note: I think that where I use the term "security" above, GnuCash uses the
term "commodity", but it still confuses me if I try to write about
commodities this way - I think of them only as being sugar, corn, oil, etc.)


> > * I'd really like to see performance based on the current year,
>    rather than on a cost basis. I submitted an RFE comment to this
>    effect in December - although I have a workaround: I rebased
>    everything at 31 December. Not pretty, but it works.
>
> There are a couple RFE bugs looking for setting a date range. I'd like
> to start that report from scratch, after refactoring those bits I
> discussed above.
>
> > * Maybe have an export facility, so that the report can be exported as a
> s-expr (rather than a complicated html) for further processing. I can
> imagine that being seen in a dim light, though.
>
>
> for this, and the things above, patches are always welcome.
>

Andrew, you really seem to be the leader in this area, and I'll be happy to
help you any way I can once I can get my attention off the QIF importer,
time permitting.


> There is one thing missing from the basis calculations, and thus from
> the gains calculations, and that is tracking Lots. If Lots are used,
> they should be tracked in the report. I haven't done it yet because of
> time constraints (and distractions ;) but I think it should be done
> *after* refactoring as the report is unweildy enough as it is...
>
> A
>

-Charles