Help importing historical stock prices

[David T.]

Jim,

The short answer of course would be that you would need past valuations for the income statement to give accurate past values. 

However, I personally am mostly interested in what my portfolio might be worth today, and how that compares to what I paid for it. I am not as concerned about how much it was worth six months, a year, or five years ago. The Income Statement (Balance Sheet?) also reflects that, since it defaults to give a snapshot as of the end of the accounting period. I understand that it is simple to change the date for the snapshot to another date, and thus obtain values for other dates. However, if the report were aiming to give performance over time, then it seems to me that there would be interim valuations included in the report. 

I guess I would ask you how this historical data would benefit your analysis of your holdings today?

Regardless of our own opinions about the importance of such data, the tools haven’t been incorporated directly into the application. Until someone takes the time to code the tools into GnuCash, we users have limited options available to obtain these data.

David

> On Jun 20, 2016, at 9:47 AM, Jim Vincent <jimvincent2 at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
> David -
> You said 
> ” However, before you go down that rabbit hole, perhaps you want to consider other means? GnuCash is designed firstly as an accounting   app, and thus its focus is on actual transactions (as opposed to important, but not real, valuations). In other words, GnuCash works very well to document the value at which you purchased your stocks, and the value at which you sell them, but its toolset is not as useful for tracking valuation of holdings over multiple time periods. You might be trying to use a hammer to put in a screw."
> But the income statement shows unrealized gains or losses - which implies the values on the balance sheet are at market, not cost.
> So if I want accurate data for past periods, don't I need market prices for securities at those time?
> Jim
> -----Original Message-----
> From: David T. [mailto:sunfish62 at yahoo.com] 
> Sent: Tuesday, June 7, 2016 8:47 AM
> To: Jim Vincent <jimvincent2 at comcast.net>
> Cc: david.carlson.417 at gmail.com; gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> Subject: Re: Help importing historical stock prices
> 
> The wiki page includes the necessary scripts to gather and insert historical prices into a GnuCash file. I believe that you will need to have compiled GnuCash with python enabled, which will depend on the operating system you use.
> 
> However, before you go down that rabbit hole, perhaps you want to consider other means? GnuCash is designed firstly as an accounting app, and thus its focus is on actual transactions (as opposed to important, but not real, valuations). In other words, GnuCash works very well to document the value at which you purchased your stocks, and the value at which you sell them, but its toolset is not as useful for tracking valuation of holdings over multiple time periods. You might be trying to use a hammer to put in a screw.
> 
> If the reason you are trying to get these historical values is to establish the past value of your portfolio, it might be easier to use a spreadsheet to do this. I know that you can set up a Google Sheet with embedded functions that will quickly and easliy retrieve stock prices—without python or perl scripts. An hour or two (or three) experimenting in that might give you what you need more quickly.
> 
> David
> 
>> On Jun 7, 2016, at 8:26 AM, Jim Vincent <jimvincent2 at comcast.net> wrote:
>> 
>> There is finance-quote script. I was hoping that I could use that to get the prices and get them into gnu-cash. The amount of data is not a big concern – although there are a lot of stocks (maybe a hundred), I just need year-end data for the past six years, plus data for a starting point. I need the list of stocks to input to finance-quote, along with a list of the dates I need data for. 
>> 
>> I am willing to pay if someone can help me.
>> 
>> Jim Vincent
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> From: david.carlson.417 at gmail.com [mailto:david.carlson.417 at gmail.com] 
>> Sent: Tuesday, June 7, 2016 7:29 AM
>> To: jimvincent2 at comcast.net; gnucash-user at gnucash.org
>> Subject: Re: Help importing historical stock prices
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Jim
>> 
>> There is no easy way to do that.  If someone has written a script to do that perhaps they can tell us about it.
>> 
>> Adding a lot of price history to the data would just make the file huge anyway.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> I sometimes add a few prices manually if I want them for a certain report.  
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> David C
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Sent from my LG G Pad 7.0 LTE, an AT&T 4G LTE tablet
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> ------ Original message------
>> 
>> From: Jim Vincent
>> 
>> Date: Mon, Jun 6, 2016 8:46 PM
>> 
>> To: gnucash-user at gnucash.org <mailto:gnucash-user at gnucash.org> ;
>> 
>> Subject:Help importing historical stock prices
>> 
>> 
>> 
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