[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> I am new to gnucash and very new to the mailing list. So please excuse me if
> I make any novice errors.
I am very new to the list as well. Hopefully I am not making a nuisance
of myself.
> I am getting into this conversation pretty late in the game. There are two
> ways of looking at the stock information that you need. Sometimes you will
> need to record your stock at the fair market value. When a business reports
> its financial statements to banks, the public ect. it requires that certain
> accounts be recorded at fair market value, the associated unrecognized gain
> or loss gets recorded to the income statement. So having the number of
> shares you own in a stock is important. For tax purposes the user needs to
> know the historical cost to that when sold the capital gain/loss can be
> computed.
I agree. I was not suggesting that the number of shares not be recorded.
We were trying to figure out whether the number of shares in the initial
transaction should be adjusted for a stock split. As linas has pointed
out, altering an existing transaction in the log is probably not a very
good idea.
So you are faced with either tracking splits, or simply always having
your current number of shares on hand. The amount of effort by the end
user is identical, unless there is some way to automatically capture
split information as it occurs. Personally, I'd rather look at a
statement and just make sure my current share count is up-to-date before
I ran any fair market value analysis. I've looked at the problem of
harvesting split information, and have yet to find a source that is a)
free, and b) reliable enough to trust without input from the end user.
I should point out, "fair market value" of any particular holding really
isn't the sort of thing that the core accounting engine seems
particularly suited for. Sooner or later, you need external input --
most commonly this takes the form of quotes, but I consider split
information at least as ephemeral.
Matt
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