profit/loss with mutual funds

[linas@linas.org]

It's been rumoured that Jason Rennie said:
> 
> 
> 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.

Hmm.

Once upon a time, there was a field called 'action' associated with each
transaction, and it was meant to hold some menu selectable annotation:
e.g. 'cap gain', 'dividend', 'purchase'.  The intent of this field 
was to enable exactly what you are talking about: reports & graphs would
slice and dice based on the value stored there. 

However, this was removed from the 1.4 gui, mostly because there were no
reports & graphs that made use of that value ....

So its a chicken & egg thing ....

I suppose that once the reporting & graphing infrastructure gets stable
& padded out with more useful & interesting reports, then the need for
this field will push it back into the register GUI.

--linas