price editor keeps past prices for ROI

[Larry Evans]

On 07/02/2006 06:03 PM, David Hampton wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-07-02 at 17:16 -0500, Larry Evans wrote:
> 
>>I need to keep track of security prices vs. time so that
>>I may calculate average return on investment.
>>The price editor only keeps one price per security.
> 
> 
> Why do you think this?  GnuCash never automatically deletes stock

Because, in the price editor, after selecting a commodity, there's
inputs for:

   date:
   type:
   price:

there's not a table with columns labeled date and price like:

     commodity: IBM
     date       price ($/share)
     ----       -----
     2004/01/01 1.00
     2005/01/01 1.01
     2006/01/01 1.02



> prices.  The only way price quotes should disappear is if you manually
> tell GnuCash to delete them. 
> 

OK, I just checked the reports and see a price scatter plot.  However,
I've been unable to get that to work because I get the message:

Your selected commodity and the currency of the report are identical. It 
doesn't make sense to show prices for identical commodities.

How do I just get a plot of price vs. time or simply see a table
of price vs. time like that shown above?

> 
>>Could this be changed to keep track of the price vs. time?
> 
> 
> What's the goal you're trying to achieve?  Are you looking for gnucash
> to use a weighted average price when computing reports?  Check the
> report options.  Looking for a price/time report for a given stock?
> Doesn't exist.  GnuCash 2.0 has the beginnings of "lots" support where
> it will automatically compute realized gain/loss on the sale of stock.
> Is this what you're trying to achieve?  (The "lots" code hasn't been
> well tested though, and may be disabled in the final 2.0 release.)


I want average return on investment.  For example.

   commodity 1:
   2000 invested   1 for 1 share.
   2001 price is   1
   2002 sold for   4

So 1*2^2 =4 hence the AveROI=100% for 2000 to 2002.  But if I'd
sold it in 2001, the AveROI would have be 0.  Between 2001
and 2002, the AveROI would be 300% (i.e. 4-1 expressed as percent).
Thus, I need the price of commodity 1 at the start and end of the
time period over which I'm calculating the AveROI.