Question - transactions between foreign currencies.

[Wm]

Sat, 7 Feb 2015 07:08:26 
<640401B0-B260-457D-B9C5-18356A2F7269 at ceridwen.us>  John Ralls 
<jralls at ceridwen.us>

>
>> On Feb 6, 2015, at 2:22 PM, Horea Christian <horea_christian at yahoo.de> wrote:
>>
>> Hello, I am using gnucash to manage my personal finances, and these span
>> quite a few currencies.
>>
>> I keep my base currency in EUR and I am familiar with how to get quotes.
>> Transfers from e.g. CHF or RON accounts to EUR work nicely. However
>> gnucash seems unable to get quotes for - in this case -  transfers
>> between RON and CHF accounts. This also happens with other non-EUR
>> currencies. What is wrong? Could you help me out?
>
>Setting aside that you should be careful when using the quotes button 
>in the transfer dialog because the exchange rate that it provides isn't 
>necessarily what was effective for your transaction, can you get RON 
><-> CHF rates online?

And just about anything v CHF will be a bit weird in retail terms over 
the last month or so.

I am reinforcing JohnR's point that market rates, even if you could work 
them out at a point in time to any other currency via another currency 
simply aren't available to most people.  You need to be shifting 
considerable amounts of money (try [USD|EUR]1,000,000) for them to be 
anything other than indicative.

>Finance::Quote, which is what actually gets the quotes, can only 
>retrieve prices from websites like Yahoo! that report on Forex markets. 
>Neither F::Q nor GnuCash have the ability to calculate a direct quote 
>from two indirect ones, e.g. dividing RON/EUR by CHF/EUR to get RON/CHF.

Not hard for a person to do presuming they got so much currency A for 
another amount of currency B

-- 
Wm...