nathan wagner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Um, no. From an accounting standpoint, the dollar value of the
> shares is what you paid for them. Until you enter a transaction to
> sell the shares, and actually realize the value, there is no
> adjustment of the value.
I think perhaps you (and Matt?) are missing one bit of information
about the engine and the way we handle transactions/je's. While you
are correct that in the end, when you're trying to see what happened
at the top-level to your finances, only the purchases and sales are
relevant, there is a lot of other information that is at least
*useful* that you might want to record in the (stock) account in the
interim.
So we record a bunch of non-purchase/sale events in the stock account
to keep track of this information: price changes (if requested),
splits, merges, etc.
The way the engine works is that you can see in your stock register
what's a purchase and a sale because it involves a je transfering
from/to some bank account (or brokerage clearing account). Other
things like splits, merges, and prices quotes don't affect other
accounts. For example splits (at least in Linas proposed method) are
transactions with all their je's pointing at the current stock
register, so they have *no* affect on your other accounts, they just
serve to modify the number of shares you hold, and most users want
their financial program to show them how many shares they currently
hold, so we need to track that information.
You seem to be arguing that je's (or transactions) and transactions
that don't affect other accounts (i.e. non-purchases/sales) shouldn't
be stored in the normal account event stream, but I don't understand
the reason for that. In the case of prices, for example, these events
don't hurt anything, and they can be very useful to the user who wants
to keep all the data associated with a stock together with the
account, and who may need to be able to look at his current financial
worth on a day to day, or historical basis, even when not connected to
the net. Further I suspect that for certain tax reporting purposes,
it may be helpful to keep this kind of historical data in the account.
--
Rob Browning <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> PGP=E80E0D04F521A094 532B97F5D64E3930
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