Foreign investment problems

[Derek Atkins]

Hi,

USD isn't a Stock..  If you have a stock, you need to use a commodity
to track that stock.  If you've got USD, then you don't have a stock.

So, which is it?  Are you trying to track a USD account, or a Stock
account?

Note that even a mutual fund "denoted" in USD (like the Vanguard
Treasury MMF) is still a "Fund" with it's own non-USD symbol.  It's
price is always $1, but it's still not USD.

In short: This is not a bug; stock accounts can only track stocks and
funds, not currencies.

For the second problem, the issue is a known bug with the way gnucash
handles "triple" commodities.  I.e. when you're dealing with a foreign
currency and a commodity (plus your locale currency).  There are
certain instances where the code just doesn't "get it right".  What
happens is that you get a transaction between a USD Account and a
FUND:Foo Account but with a common currency of "CAD".

Gnucash then looks for multiple exchange rates and gets it wrong.
This is bug #116353.

The workaround is to manually create your opening balance for these
kinds of situations, and most likely you'll need to enter these
transaction from the currency-side, not the stock-account side, and
use the exchange-rate dialog to set the number of shares.

-derek

Danny Ciarniello <Dan_Ciarniello at telus.net> writes:

> I am having some problems setting up accounts for handling foreign
> investments.  When I created my file, I specified that I wanted a set
> of Investment accounts which the wizard created for me using my
> default currency (CAD).  Since I also have some US investments, I want
> to create a set of USD investment accounts that mirror my CAD
> investment accounts.  First, I create a sub-account of Assets named
> "US Investments" of type Asset with currency USD.  Then I create a
> sub-account of "US Investments" called "Brokerage Account" of type
> Bank and, again, with currency USD.  So far, so good.  Finally, I try
> to create a Stock account as a sub-account of the USD Brokerage
> Account which is where I run into problems.  When I select Stock as
> the account type, GnuCash insists on forcing me to create a new
> commodity.  It will not let me select a currency.  I can create a
> commodity called USD (US Dollar) but it isn't a currency.  Looking at
> the contents of the gcashdata file, I see:
>
>   <act:commodity>
>     <cmdty:space>ISO4217</cmdty:space>
>     <cmdty:id>CAD</cmdty:id>
>   </act:commodity>
>  for the GnuCash created account but
>
>   <act:commodity>
>     <cmdty:space>AMEX</cmdty:space>
>     <cmdty:id>USD</cmdty:id>
>   </act:commodity>
>
> for the account I created.
>
> I can work around the problem (assuming that this really is a problem)
> by simply changing the AMEX to ISO4217.
>
> I also have another problem (which does not seem to be related to the
> above) with foreign investments.  According to the tutorial, I can
> create an equity account for Opening Balances for various currencies
> so I created an Equity account "Opening Balances USD" with currency
> USD.  The problem is that when I create a new commodity for my USD
> Stock account and specify an Opening Balance originating from my USD
> Equity account, the "Increase" column has no value and the Balance is
> 0.  When I enter a commodity with an opening balance in my CAD Stock
> account, however, the "Increase" column has a value that is reflected
> in the balance column.
>
> In both of the above cases, the obvious questionis "What am I doing wrong?"
>
> Any info is appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
> Dan.
>
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>

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available