Multiple currency issues

[Jannick Asmus]

On 09.07.2008 19:57, Charles Day wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 9, 2008 at 10:33 AM, Jannick Asmus <jannick.news at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
>> On 09.07.2008 18:49, Charles Day wrote:
>>
>>> On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 5:10 PM, Jannick Asmus <jannick.news at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>> [snip]
>>
>>  But it
>>>> seems to me that the zero results are calculated because the price-db
>>>> does
>>>> not contain a conversion rate for EUR -> USD, whereas there are price-db
>>>> entries for USD -> EUR.
>>>>
>>>> Is it intended that the conversion direction in the price-db cannot be
>>>> reversed?
>>>>
>>>>
>>> I don't know if that's the way it is intended to work, but that's
>>> apparently
>>> what is happening. There's no EUR->USD exchange rate, so zero is used and
>>> your 49.62  EUR income is converted to $0.  I can reproduce this.
>>>
>> It might not be intended due to bid/ask spreads such that the FXR EUR->USD
>> is not simply calculated as the (multiplicative) inverse of FXR USD->EUR.
>>
> 
> True, there could be a spread involved, but your quotes are not bid or ask.
> You have one "last" and two "unknown" that are from the transfer dialog. 

Quoted form 
http://www.gnucash.org/docs/v2.0/C/gnucash-guide/invest-stockprice1.html: 
"This option is for informational purposes only, it is not used by 
GnuCash." So this seems not to matter in the calculations.

> But
> using the reciprocal of bid or ask is still better than zero, I would think.
> But I guess that's just not how it works at the moment.

Correct. But I don't see a way out of that.

> Is this perhaps the point the attributes "Bid", "Ask" etc. assigned to the
>> price-db entries come into play?

No, GnuCash simply ignores them as mentioned above.

>> Furthermore, the only FXRs I am offered for online updates are ???->EUR. I
>> guess this is because my "locale" currency is EUR, but I certainly do not
>> KNOW of course.
>> Just for the courtesy of completeness this still happens if I change the
>> "default report currency" in the preferences.
>>
>> I think this could be the point why Mike could not reproduce my results
>> (see his posting within this thread) since I suspect his GnuCash's locale
>> currency is USD. ... but this is only a guess.
>>
> 
> I am currently working from the US, so my locale currency is USD, and I
> could reproduce your results. (I did change it to EUR via the preferences,
> to match how you have it, but I don't know if that made a difference.)

Ok, thanks for this piece of information. Then my theory is apparently 
not true.

> Maybe Mike is working with some slightly different code. I'm not sure. I am
> working with the latest code in trunk, so as far as I know this will still
> happen in 2.2.6.

Sounds reasonable.

>> If this comes true the reproduction of some FXR issues might become a bit
>> subtle because of the dependency on the "locale" currency. If this is true
>> samples might not give the same results if they are produced either west or
>> east of the Atlantic.
>>
>>  J.
>>>>  -Charles
>> J.
>>
>> -Charles
> 

J.