Automatic price quotes & PostgreSQL backend

[David T.]

My apologies. I am not an accountant; I was repeating what I understood to be common practice. I do see from online searches that unrealized gains are excluded from earnings statements, which for my circumstances is what matters. I am not involved in particularly elaborate investment schemes. 

Have fun, and if you devise a method for automatic price db updates, do share them back to the community. We all would benefit from such a tool.

David

On Nov 18, 2013, at 8:02 PM, Christopher Singley <csingley at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 8:01 AM, David T. <sunfish62 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I agree with you about how nice it would be to have reliable retrieval of prices. However, from a strict accounting perspective, the trading value of a particular asset is not relevant. The value is only relevant when an asset is sold.
> 
> Sometimes I have fervently wished that my auditors would agree with your position, but alas, GAAP mandates exactly the opposite when it comes to securities available for sale - the current trading value of a particular asset is far & away its most relevant attribute.
> 
> If you are an individual investor who holds fully paid-up investments (i.e. no margin borrowing, not used to collateralize a bank loan), then I guess you are probably free to ignore the mark-to-market accounting mandated by GAAP and just focus on realized gains for tax accounting, if you so choose.  However, it's probably not wise to do so - you're ignoring the opportunity cost of swapping your existing investments for other, better investments... which is the main thing that matters, no?
> 
> To the extent you're using an accounting system to inform your decision-making process... which is about the highest & best use of an accounting system... I can't imagine why you'd want NOT to measure the primary economic activity (i.e. generating investment gains) and simply focus on the secondary tax effects consequent upon such activity.  While it's a good idea to remain emotionally detached from fluctuations in asset value, it's a bad idea to be actually unaware of them.
> 
> Many/most users of financial accounts really need financial reports in multiple accounting bases - GAAP, cash, modified cash a/k/a tax basis...  It's tricky to implement awareness of the timing differences, so I'm not surprised that GnuCash hasn't got these features, but they're highly desirable, not irrelevant, and certainly not verboten by the Accounting Powers That Be, regardless of whatever finger-wagging you may have received from various financial planner types.  In point of fact, the strict accounting perspective on this matter is much more closely aligned with that of a crack-smoking Silicon Valley worker refreshing the finance pages every 10 minutes to check the current value of his stock options.
> 
> Please excuse the length of wind.  I think I'll get back to imprudently day-trading my portfolio & using GnuCash to manage the finances of a Fortune 500 company against the advice of its developers.
> 
> Cheers,
> Chris