online fund retrieval

[Holliday, Ian E]

Hi

I've run into the problem identified by several others about problems getting mutual fund prices from online sources like Yahoo. I think stock retrieval works OK, but many (most?) small investors like me have the majority of their investments in mutual funds. I'm using 2.2.9 on Windows XP. David Reiser has supplied a patch for finance::quote 1.15 that I guess I could try, but I'm not competent using python or anything much else these days - is this the most practical solution still or will the 2.4.x series have this feature covered?

It seems the problem is Yahoo occasionally modifies the page layout making retrieval of item information break in gnucash. I guess this will be an on-going problem. One respondent to posts on this topic suggested that a comprehensive solution would never be possible because there is no incentive for the data suppliers to adhere to a particular standard. In which case perhaps a longer term practical solution would be to provide support for manual import from CSV datafiles containing fund information composed by users from portfolios outside gnucash. For example you can set up a portfolio system on the FT website for free and export to CSV. Gnucash users would merely have to tag columns in gnucash, as when importing transaction to an account. I imagine the existing import tool could already be the framework for a program to do this. This solution would mean there would be no need for maintaining the web page screen-scaper information, or whatever it is that keeps breaking.

Ian