How to create a fund account

[David Hampton]

On Sun, 2006-06-25 at 13:20 +0200, Michael Wild wrote:

> but the "Symbol/abbreviaton" field is not obvious. the fund i want to 
> enter does not have a ticker symbol, but a valor number.

This field is generally the ticker symbol for stocks.  For any other
security or commodity, this should be whatever value is typically used
to specify the security.  This value will be passed unchanged to
Finance::Quote when you request online quote retrieval, so it should be
whatever value the quote source uses for your fund.

> in the CUSIP field, for safety, i enter just the same.

This can be anything you want. The value is unused by Gnucash.

> and then, what bugs me: in the prices editor, i add the two funds and 
> try to get the online quotes. however, this fails. 

Where are you trying to retrieve the quote from?  You must specify a
quote source that knows about your particular funds.  Depending on the
fund, this source may or may not exist.  Gnucash uses the Finance::Quote
program which has sources for retrieving most stocks, and sources for
retrieving a variety of funds in a variety of countries.  I don't know
of a specific source for retrieving Swiss mutual funds.

> if i change the symbol of the security to CHF (it's a swiss fund),
> the online update works.

The update works because you're just pulling quotes for Swiss Francs vs.
your local currency, which I'm guessing is also Swiss Francs.  I'm sure
that's not what you want.

> but in that case, i can only have a single fund in my portfolio, 
> because it seems that the "symbol" field must be unique. how to go about 
> this?
> to get the facts about the two funds:
> http://fundlife.com/system/EN/index.cfm?m=m2_1_1&fundid=14926
> http://fundlife.com/system/EN/index.cfm?m=m2_1_1&fundid=13952

Both of these URLs return a database error when I try them.

In order to retrieve online quotes for these funds you will need to find
a quote source (a Finance::Quote module) than know how to retrieve the
prices for these funds.  If it module doesn't already exist, then you
will need write on or get someone to write one.

David