profit/loss with mutual funds

Jason Rennie jrennie@ai.mit.edu
Thu, 22 Feb 2001 14:08:29 -0500


linas@linas.org said:
> The engine has C code for a 'fifo' that would handle this correctly,
> However, none of the reports currently use this, and I'm not sure what
> that would take. (old gnucash-1.2 used to do this, but it fell into
> disrepair). 

If I'm not mistaken, FIFO is a method for calculating realized gains and
losses.  I think what Dirk was concerned about is overall rate of return.
The problem is that capital gains are gains that are to be considered part
of the rate of return, yet the stock report treats them as investing of
additional money.  In order for the stock report to show something closer
to the actual rate of return, one needs to be able to identify a
transaction as being a capital gain/dividend so that those shares are
added to the final valuation, but not the initial valuation of the fund.

Jason