Thoughts about the stock quote database

[Steven Rutter]

A few months back I wrote a perl/gtk program called GtkPortfolio [can be found
on freshmeat]. It will automatically update quotes for multiple portfolios,
view news, charts and allows you to set price alerts. I released it on
freshmeat under the Artistic License because I though others might find it
useful - but it was written for my personal use because I couldn't find
anything comparable.

Recently one of your developers, Linas, contacted me and mentioned the
possibility of integrating it with gnucash [i assume as a seperate app that
shares gnucash's database].

It's in need of a rewrite to clean up the code [I also believe the news feature
has broken since i first wrote it] and add some more features I intended to
build in after I first released it.

I haven't touched it in a good while, but if there is interest in integrating
it with gnucash's database I'd be willing to do that. Just let me know what you
need.

On a side note I've since switched from linux to openbsd for my workstation and
my first attempt at compiling gnome wasn't good. So before I can even take a
look at gnucash I'll need to get that working - if anyone has successfully
compiled gnome on openbsd [2.8] please share your notes.

Thanks,
Steven Rutter

On Tue, 12 Dec 2000 17:59:12 -0800, Dave Peticolas said:

: =?iso-8859-1?Q?Tor-=D8yvind_Gundersen?= writes:
:  > 
:  > I don't think I can stop using GnuCash after getting the taste of it. Good
:  > work, guys :)
:  
:  On behalf of everyone, thanks!
:  
:  
:  > I recently joined the gnucash-devel list, so I haven't even had the time to
:  > lurk around a lot, but I've browsed through the recent entries in the
:  > archive. There I read about the ongoing process of separating the stock
:  > qoutes from the GnuCash accounts.
:  > 
:  > My main question: Will this stock quote database be a separate product or
:  > will it only be a part of GnuCash? I think it would be great to have a
:  > separate quote database accessible from a variety of financial applications
:  > like GnuCash (of course:), Gnumeric(?), graph plotters, technical analysis
:  > programs, ...well, you name it.
:  > 
:  > By outsourcing the stock quote handling, GnuCash doesn't have to know about
:  > how to access all the different stock exchanges, and the end user doesn't
:  > have to maintain different databases containing the same quote datasets (a
:  > big advantage).
:  
:  We already do online quotes, but that work is 'outsourced' to the
:  Finance::Quote program (available on sourceforge). It is a separate
:  project from GnuCash.
:  
:  As far as the database itself, it may make sense to eventually separate
:  it from GnuCash. In the short term, we kind of need it asap, so it will
:  probably be a part of GnuCash.
:  
:  
:  > Because of its fundamental usage, the quote database should only include
:  > "official market prices", or else the results from, say, a technical
:  > analysis program would be at least unreliable.
:  > 
:  > Following this thought, I don't see how it makes sense to put the buy/sell
:  > price from an actual transaction in a GnuCash account into the quote
:  > database, as the price entered in GnuCash might be the result of a special
:  > deal like, say, a bet :)
:  > 
:  > That would also solve the problem of how deleted transactions in GnuCash
:  > would affect the quote database (as mentioned in the other thread). Simply
:  > because a stand-alone quote database wouldn't be affected at all.
:  
:  What if we annotated quotes with their source? Then quotes for particular
:  transactions could be excluded from analysis.
:  
:  
:  > 
:  > I hope this hasn't already been discussed to death, and I really hope I
:  > presented some new points and not only stated established facts.
:  
:  Actually, we're just starting to talk about this, so please join in.
:  
:  dave
:  
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-- 
Steven Rutter <steven@centercube.com>