Multiple currency issues

[Charles Day]

On Wed, Jul 9, 2008 at 10:33 AM, Jannick Asmus <jannick.news at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On 09.07.2008 18:49, Charles Day wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 5:10 PM, Jannick Asmus <jannick.news at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>
> [snip]
>
>  But it
>>> seems to me that the zero results are calculated because the price-db
>>> does
>>> not contain a conversion rate for EUR -> USD, whereas there are price-db
>>> entries for USD -> EUR.
>>>
>>> Is it intended that the conversion direction in the price-db cannot be
>>> reversed?
>>>
>>>
>> I don't know if that's the way it is intended to work, but that's
>> apparently
>> what is happening. There's no EUR->USD exchange rate, so zero is used and
>> your 49.62  EUR income is converted to $0.  I can reproduce this.
>>
>
> It might not be intended due to bid/ask spreads such that the FXR EUR->USD
> is not simply calculated as the (multiplicative) inverse of FXR USD->EUR.
>

True, there could be a spread involved, but your quotes are not bid or ask.
You have one "last" and two "unknown" that are from the transfer dialog. But
using the reciprocal of bid or ask is still better than zero, I would think.
But I guess that's just not how it works at the moment.

Is this perhaps the point the attributes "Bid", "Ask" etc. assigned to the
> price-db entries come into play?
>
> Furthermore, the only FXRs I am offered for online updates are ???->EUR. I
> guess this is because my "locale" currency is EUR, but I certainly do not
> KNOW of course.
> Just for the courtesy of completeness this still happens if I change the
> "default report currency" in the preferences.
>
> I think this could be the point why Mike could not reproduce my results
> (see his posting within this thread) since I suspect his GnuCash's locale
> currency is USD. ... but this is only a guess.
>

I am currently working from the US, so my locale currency is USD, and I
could reproduce your results. (I did change it to EUR via the preferences,
to match how you have it, but I don't know if that made a difference.)

Maybe Mike is working with some slightly different code. I'm not sure. I am
working with the latest code in trunk, so as far as I know this will still
happen in 2.2.6.


> If this comes true the reproduction of some FXR issues might become a bit
> subtle because of the dependency on the "locale" currency. If this is true
> samples might not give the same results if they are produced either west or
> east of the Atlantic.
>
>  J.
>>
>>>
>>>  -Charles
>>
>
> J.
>
> -Charles