On Sat, 08 Jul 2000, Terry Boldt wrote:
> On Sat, 08 Jul 2000, you wrote:
> > Stocks can also be in fractional shares, thanks to things like stock
> > splits and "share-dividends".
>
> This I can atest to - one of the insurance companies I deal with converted
> from a mutual to public a few years back. Each policy owner got shares
> based on their policy. I got a whopping 16.xxx shares. They gave everybody
> the option of immediately selling through them. I have kept the shares,
> i.e., an entry in their books, just for the heck of it. Selling 16.xxx
> shares just wasn't worth the time and effort to return a stamped,
> self-addressed envelop. Every year I get a dividend of 0.xxxx cents (thats
> the number of decimal places they carry in their correspondence and I
> assume their books). So every year they buy me another 0.xxx shares. I now
> have the grand total of 33.166 shares (they split two for 1).
>
> I find it amusing (that's the main reason I haven't bothered trying to
> sell) to every year get this statement with a dividend of so many cents
> carried out to the fourth decimal point. That's 1/10,000 of a cent - they
> really do keep track of it that close (I'm assuming - otherwise they are
> wasting a lot of paper and postage telling their shareholders they do).
>
> So in order for gnucash to keep track of this stock for me, it would have
> to keep track of stock to within 1/1,000 of a stock unit and money (US) to
> within 1/10,000 of a cent. If that isn't reasonable I can understand - I'll
> just keep letting the insurance company keep it on their books and track it
> for me :-)
There is certainly no problem to keeping track of those 1/1000th shares.
By your above statement, you now have 33,166 of them.
As for the cash side, it gets more complicated. What does the 1099-DIV report?
Since the stock cannot EXACTLY cost the amount of the dividend, what do they
do with the residual? If they discard it after computing the number of
thousandth-shares, I would ignore the supposed precision and simply record
the cents.
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