[GNC] Using GnuCash Wiki: Add Stock Page: Screenshots Added

john jralls at ceridwen.us
Wed Oct 12 00:02:22 EDT 2022



> On Oct 11, 2022, at 5:06 PM, Frank H. Ellenberger <frank.h.ellenberger at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> Am 12.10.22 um 01:34 schrieb R Losey:
>> In GnuCash 4.12 on my Mac, I don't have a "Type" field -- it's called "Name
>> Space" instead... I thought one needed to put the correct exchange there,
>> but now I'm not sure.
> 
> Before we had used in different GUI elements different names for the same thing.
> 
> And we dropped the US centric and outdated list, which had confused many users. Similar to the account code you can create your own system to structure your investments.
> 
> The name of the exchange has only to be set inn some cases as F::Q source.

The namespace isn't even passed to F::Q. F::Q wouldn't know what to do with it. F::Q wants a quote source (e.g. yahoo_json, alphavantage, aex, etc.) and a symbol. If you're using F::Q you need to make sure that the symbol you set is the one that the quote source you choose understands for that particular security.

Namespaces are useful for symbol disambiguation. Although I don't know of a specific example, it's easily conceivable that the same symbol is used in different price sources referring to different stocks. The price database generally uses namespace and symbol for lookups, so putting the two securities in different namespaces allows the price database to easily find the right one when creating prices.

Absent duplication they're useful for you to categorize your holdings. You can use any arbitrary scheme you like: Exchange, industry, country, holding category (e.g. speculative, growth, value); however it makes sense to you to sort your investments. You can also use none at all, in which case GnuCash will create a Non-Currency category for you. Remember that the CURRENCY namespace is special, hard-conded, and restricted to currencies (including obsolete ones) recognized by the ISO-4217 committee. 

When the feature was originally written some 20 or so years ago the author hard-coded some US stock exchanges--NYSE, NASDEX, AMEX, etc.as examples. We've found that to confuse a lot of users, making them think that those were the only choices, or that the categories had to be exchanges, so we removed them a few releases ago while working on something related.

Regards,
John Ralls



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