Inability to correct GBP value for Euro priced shares

[John Ralls]

> On Jun 10, 2017, at 10:35 AM, Fred Bone <Fred.Bone at dial.pipex.com> wrote:
> 
> On 10 June 2017 at 16:47, Eric Coates said:
> 
> [...]
>> At some point, somehow I had managed to enter a price for Airbus shares in
>> GBPs (I've no idea how; when adding a price manually the price is
>> automatically set in Euros, I must have worked extra hard to make this
>> mistake!). I removed just that one price and everything works as expected.
>> 
>> My apologies to Fred and Maf for wasting their time. And thanks for the
>> support. Without that I suspect I would not have kept investigating. I now
>> know a lot more about organising accounts, buying shares in "foreign"
>> currencies and pricing.
> 
> No apology needed, in my direction at least.
> 
> I can verify that an old price in GBP trumps a new one in EUR. This *has* 
> to be a bug, surely?
> 
> I will log a bug on Bugzilla shortly.

It might be a bug, but it's so minor and obscure that we're not even going to consider it. I've made a detailed response on the bug report [1], but the executive summary is that securities priced in multiple currencies don't exist. Shares in a company may trade separately in multiple countries in different currencies (Royal Dutch Shell comes to mind, having class A shares that trade in EUR in Frankfurt and class B shares trading in GBP in London), but one can't buy e.g. LSE shares for GBP and then sell those same shares on Euronext for EUR. Your broker might be willing to exchange them for you if they happen to make a market in both, but the fee is likely to exceed any arbitrage gain you might have made.

GnuCash's treatment of currencies is different; ISO-4217 and GnuCash recognize precious metals as currency because they *are* fungible across currencies. Beware, though: That's actual lumps of metal, not futures or units of funds or partnerships holding metal. The latter are securities and trade in only one currency.

Regards,
John Ralls

[1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=783636