Rounding in the price db.

David Carlson david.carlson.417 at gmail.com
Wed Aug 19 14:17:07 EDT 2015


In the past I have been reconciling stocks separately from the containing
brokerage account(s), but it gets tedious in a couple of accounts that
contain several different securities.  It seems logical to me to only need
to reconcile a brokerage statement once instead of several times each
month.  I think a lot of individuals have one or more brokerage or
retirement accounts containing listed stocks and/or mutual funds.  I am
sure that it would not be trivial to implement a single reconcile for a
brokerage account, but it still should be fairly straightforward.  I would
consider this to be common enough to consider implementation.

While you correctly note that values will never be universally consistent,
I think that any one brokerage statement should be consistent within
itself, and that it is very likely to match whatever Yahoo or Google quotes
in the local currency at the end of the month, if that is the date of the
statement.

I do not have mixed currencies in one brokerage account, and while I have
seen a few emails from users that do mix currencies in their daily lives, I
think that is not very common.  I could be wrong.  GnuCash does not work
well for day traders, for example, and it does not have to work well for
every other uncommon scenario.

David C

On Wed, Aug 19, 2015 at 9:56 AM, John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:

>
> > On Aug 19, 2015, at 1:44 PM, David Carlson <david.carlson.417 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > I have been watching this thread and am glad that this discussion is
> happening.
> >
> > The price db  is also used in the reconciliation dialog when reconciling
> an account with subaccounts. The reconciliation dialog appears to use the
> most recent value, where I  would expect it to use nearest in time to the
> reconciliation date.
> >
> > Would there any value to keeping one price from each source as opposed
> to only one value?  Also, is it possible to have securities valued in more
> than one currency?
>
> Ooh, I’ll have to look into that. It doesn’t seem to me to be a good way
> to handle reconciliation. In fact I’m inclined to disable including
> subaccounts if the currencies don’t match. Can you articulate a use case
> where reconciling a parent account with multiple-currency children makes
> sense?
>
> The current code doesn’t use the source info for anything other than
> displaying to the user, so there’s no present use to retaining prices with
> different sources. That doesn’t mean there would never be, but it would
> complicate the code quite a bit so the use case would have to be pretty
> compelling.
>
> Yes, there’s support for security prices in multiple currencies. I think
> using that facility is likely to produce interesting results. Consider a
> company that trades on both the Shanghai and New York stock exchanges in
> RMB and USD respectively. There are a variety of reasons why one might
> expect the price on the two exchanges to be rather loosely coupled:
> Arbitrage difficulty, the current negative sentiment on Chinese exchanges
> and the resulting government controls, the desire of wealthy Chinese to
> expatriate their wealth, etc.
>
> Regards,
> John Ralls
>
>


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