Commodities and reports

[John Schmerge]

Hey guys,

  Keep in mind reading this that I really am very new, and have really
no idea of where to start with any of these ideas...

  I'm thinking that it would be kinda nice to add some features to
gnucash for the sake of analyzing securities and commodities, and would
like to solicit some input/start a discussion about the best way to do
this.

First, a couple of things regarding the advance portfolio report:

  * It would be nice to be able to view %change over a given date range,
rather than from first-transaction to end-date.

  * Basis calculations don't take into account dividend reinvestments
(or afaik any transaction coming from an income account). This is
probably on purpose, but should probably be listed in a new column in
the report.

 * This is probably more of an engine modification than a report
problem, but it would also be nice to be able to sum-up all sub-accounts
into a parent account total as long as all of those sub-accounts and
parent account share the same currency/commodity. For example given this
account tree:

Assets
  Stock
    EXC
      EXC - 2001 transactions
      EXC - 2002 transactions
      EXC - 2003 transactions

It would be great if the A.P. report could show a total for all of the
EXC sub-accounts as a single line by selecting the parent account.

Secondly, I'd like to start adding more advanced charting features for
reporting on securities (i.e. bar/candle charts, moving averages,
boilinger bands, etc). I'm thinking that this would either require some
reworking of the price db to store high/low/opening/closing prices for a
given day or require some code to pull the data directly from some place
like yahoo. I'm really not that enthusiastic about either option, being
that this could potentially be a great deal of data that really
shouldn't be stored in the GNC data file or pulled from an internet
source every time. Any thoughts you guys have on this would be
appreciated.

Also, I'm wondering if the current report rendering engine can support
anything more advanced than basic scatter-plots... Can someone provide
me a link to some info on this? I'm almost leaning towards having this
type of graphing capability be an actual tool, hanging off of the tools
menu, rather than a report. Any thoughts?

Thanks,
John