Introducing myself

[Andrew Sackville-West]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2008 at 11:50:08AM +0000, Mark Carter wrote:
> 
> My interest lies primarily in the advanced portfolio, and I've got
some personal itches to scratch. The module alone is about the size of
my entire python finance package, so the prospect of dipping into
somethign completely new is fairly daunting. I noticed that someone is
already working on the advanced portfolio, although not in the areas
that currently interest me. 

The advanced portfolio report is frankly a pretty broken concept in
gnucash right now. THe report does a fairly good job, now, I think, at
what it's supposed to do, but what its supposed to do is not really
very useful. It does, however, now have some useful bits of code in it
that I intend to factor out into a "portfolio utilities"
library. Those functions could then be called by any number of reports
to build different views of the portfolio. 

Interesting things that I think it would provide: cost-basis at date,
cumulative money invested at date, realized gains to date, maybe
deltas of all those (date range) etc.

The primary motivation for that is to: 

1. shorten up the advanced portfolio report itself]
2. make it easy to write a portfolio performance report with a
specifiable date range.
3. other reports like you've suggested below.

> 
> The sort of things that I have in mind for enhancement are:
> * showing the perfomance of mutual funds and share protfolio
> separately, and in aggregate

I'm not sure what you mean by this. You can easily select which
accounts go into the report and then save that modified report...

> * showing the performance against a market index

can we get quotes for market indexes? I'm sure we can, but don't
know. The trick would be to get an interface into the pricing db and
then track it's price over time alongside the actual accounts. It
should be fairly simple provided there is data on the market
index. This would require the user to create the index in the price
editor and get quotes for it.

> * I'd really like to see performance based on the current year,
    rather than on a cost basis. I submitted an RFE comment to this
    effect in December - although I have a workaround: I rebased
    everything at 31 December. Not pretty, but it works.

There are a couple RFE bugs looking for setting a date range. I'd like
to start that report from scratch, after refactoring those bits I
discussed above. 

> * Maybe have an export facility, so that the report can be exported as a s-expr (rather than a complicated html) for further processing. I can imagine that being seen in a dim light, though.


for this, and the things above, patches are always welcome.

There is one thing missing from the basis calculations, and thus from
the gains calculations, and that is tracking Lots. If Lots are used,
they should be tracked in the report. I haven't done it yet because of
time constraints (and distractions ;) but I think it should be done
*after* refactoring as the report is unweildy enough as it is...

A

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