Question About Price DB

[David Carlson]

On 2/3/2013 3:38 PM, David T. wrote:
> Hi there--
>
> I am going through some VERY old mutual fund holdings I have, and I have noticed a behavior that appears odd to me.
>
> If I am entering a transaction into the register, my practice is to fill out the number of shares involved and a dollar amount. From those two data points, GnuCash calculates the share price, and I head happily on to something else.
>
> I would have expected that this transaction entry would have resulted in an entry into the Price DB for that commodity on the date of my transaction, but that doesn't appear to be the case.
>
> A couple of questions:
>
> 1) Is this an accurate assessment, or am I mis-reading things somehow?
> 2) If they aren't going in, why not?
> 3) If these entries aren't going into the Price DB, does this affect value calculations over time? I am specifically considering the Advanced Portfolio report, where I think that it does.
>
> TIA,
> David
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> gnucash-user mailing list
> gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user
> -----
> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
>

David,

You have hit on one of the "Easter Eggs"  that can follow from good
documentation of stock transactions that I am starting to accumulate
information on in the thread I just started.

It seems that if a stock transaction is edited from a "Currency" account
it is possible to trigger the creation of a stock price for the
transaction edit date, with the caveat that GnuCash will try to set the
price for that edit date to the same as the last existing entry in the
price editor.  The trick is that GnuCash thinks that you are entering a
currency trade.  You will get a "Transfer Funds" pop-up to enter an
exchange rate, which will be preset to the last entry in the price
database.  There is an option to enter the value that you really want by
selecting "To Amount" and entering the fraction number of
shares/Dollars(or your currency).  Decimals are ok, Gnucash will convert
the ratio to a weird fraction when it enters the data into the price
database.

When I say "Currency" account that usually means the brokerage account
that is already associated to one of the lines in your stock trade
transaction.  Note the comment in my thread that if you want to actually
edit the number of shares or price in a line associated to a stock
account, you must press Enter to complete the currency edit that you
just did, then right click on the security account line that you just
messed with, and select "Jump" to the security account to actually
adjust the number of shares and price. 

Have fun.

David C
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 0xDC7C8BF3.asc
Type: application/pgp-keys
Size: 1729 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/attachments/20130203/1ec796e1/attachment.bin>