historical quotes

[Roland Roberts]

Charles Gagnon wrote:
> Can gnucash get historical quotes from Yahoo! I don't need to go very 
> far but for reconciliation purposes, it would be nice to run a command 
> and fetch prices for 3/31/08.
>
> I import the OFX file from my broker so the securities are a lot of time 
> not listed in gnucash until after I import the file which could be done 
> any time in April. At that point, to compare all the values with my 
> statement, I would need the prices from the closing date on the statement
I'm not real clear on your need for historical quotes.  I don't usually 
bother with them.  For actual stock purchases, I have statements from my 
stock account on the dates of the transaction(s).  Intermediate dates 
are not important tax-wise, so I ignore them for accounting.

For my 401k, I get quarterly statements only meaning I do not know what 
the purchase prices were.  To have something half-way rational, I 
maintain a spreadsheet that lets me enter the data from my quarterly 
statement to calculate average purchase price after accounting for 
dividends, loss/gain, etc.  I then enter that average amount into 
GnuCash.  This keeps my 401k account values correct as well as assuring 
that my 401k "holding" account (this is where my contributions go before 
I account for the purchases) has a nominal end-of-quarter balance of 
zero (subject to a certain amount of jitter in dates due to when exactly 
the purchase is made and when the transfer from my company to the plan 
administrator happens).

roland

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Roland B. Roberts, PhD                             RL Enterprises
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