Matt Sisk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> In the intervening time period, there are numerous things that could be
> affecting your stocks. As you point out, the price fluctuates. Although
> the number of shares do not fluctuate minute by minute, the nevertheless
> possibly fluctuate due to splits/joins. My intuition says that from the
> perspective of the bottom line, the only thing that is important about
> the process is the total amount of the purchase and the total amount of
> the sale; in that sense, perhaps the "transaction" should not be
> considered complete until you have sold the X shares. (is there any
> utility in modeling a double-entry transaction with sub-transactions,
> each of which also happen to be double-entry?).
I think perhaps you misunderstand what we mean by a transaction. A
transaction is an informative event affecting at least one, and
possibly other acoounts. So buying a stock is an event where you
transfer money from a brokerage account to a stock account, and
selling a stock is the reverse. A split or a price update is an event
that *only* affects the stock account.
If it makes you more comfortable, you can consider the non-buy/sell
events to just be informative. In the case of pricing events, they
only serve to tell you what your assets would be worth (if you sold
them), but that's useful when you're trying to decide if you have
enough resources to buy a house, and in the case of stock split
events, it's just making sure you have an accurate record of how many
shares you have, and how you got there.
In addition, this "event logging" approach (as compared to the
approach you and nathan are proposiing) has the advantage of more
intuitively matching the statements you get from your financial
institutions.
Consider this, along with my response to nathan above, and see if it
doesn't help make things clearer...
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Rob Browning <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> PGP=E80E0D04F521A094 532B97F5D64E3930
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