New to GnuCash

[Wm]

Wed, 7 Jan 2015 20:57:21 
<1026854498.6053551.1420664241604.JavaMail.yahoo at jws10678.mail.bf1.yahoo.
com>  David T. <sunfish62 at yahoo.com>

>With regard to the question about Mutual Fund (and stocks, for that 
>matter) price tracking, GnuCash does not emphasize this. My 
>understanding (and I am sure that my comments will cause others to jump 
>in to correct my understanding) is that GnuCash aims to be a 
>traditional double-entry accounting system, and the developers take the 
>(as I understand it) accountants' viewpoint that the software needs to 
>track the held asset, and not necessarily its fluctuating value. Thus, 
>the toolset for gathering and tracking an asset's unrealized loss or 
>gain is somewhat limited.

I think that is a very good summation.

Consider someone doing intra-day trading, gnc would be impractical, you 
need close to real time feed.

Even dealing on a daily basis wouldn't work as gnc uses publicly 
accessible (time delayed) quote sources, you'd be behind other traders.

Checking your portfolio weekly or monthly or whenever you feel like it? 
gnc will able to help you with that.

===

Other people may do it differently but I find myself gathering a lot of 
price information around the time I'm thinking of doing something and a 
bit afterwards, then I delete all but the immediately surrounding public 
price records (obviously I keep my real ones).

Further, gnc's graphs are generally aimed at tracking assets you own, so 
if you are *thinking* of buying Company A, gnc would be a bad place to 
start as you'll just end up with a load of crap in your files and some 
graphs you may not understand [1]

[1] if you can naturally read the X and Y on a gnc Price Scatterplot let 
the rest of the world know :)


-- 
Wm...