Reporting: weighted average price source

Charles Day cedayiv at gmail.com
Mon Jul 7 16:18:06 EDT 2008


On Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 12:23 PM, Christian Stimming <stimming at tuhh.de>
wrote:

> Am Montag, 7. Juli 2008 18:42 schrieb Charles Day:
> > > So it's not a question of absolute values in bookkeeping.  It's
> > > a question of absolute values in computing share prices.  Not
> > > the same thing.
> >
> > I agree with Derek. That is, the "weighted average" price source is not
> > intended to compute the cost of your holdings, but rather to compute the
> > volume-weighted average price of all buys AND sells. So it needs to keep
> > using the absolute value. However, it does need to be changed: it should
> > ignore exchanges with a zero "amount" in the split.
> >
> > So I think we need to add a new price source of "Cost" which computes
> > without absolute value and does include zero "amount" splits.
>
> Yes. The existing "weighted average" answers a different question that the
> one
> you are more interested in.
>
> > I do think a volume-weighted average price can be useful; it's just more
> > appropriate for measuring your personal trading performance. Maybe there
> > should be a performance report designed around that.
>
> Exactly, and it has been introduced precisely to measure personal trading
> performance. I recall I basically used this in the "price scatterplot",
> which
> is probably only about what you said. For the cost of your current
> holdings,
> I agree this is probably wrong. Feel free to move the old one to a
> different
> name or rename the new and the old. Maybe the old "weighted average" should
> even be available only in the price scatterplot and nowhere else. But
> simply
> replacing it is IMHO not the best way to go.
>

I've added the new price source which I have called "Average Cost" (for now,
at least). Committed as r17266.

For now I have not removed the "Weighted Average" price source from any
reports. I will have a look at that later on.

-Charles


> Christian
>


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