Hey everyone… Brand new user making a Newbie mistake, but can’t for the life of me see where… Set up a “training portfolio” in UK Sterling - seemed all OK. Credited the Deposit account with what I thought was GBP£10,000 - looked OK. Made 8 purchases of what I thought was £1,000 each in 8 of the UK Dividend Aristocrats - looked OK.
But…
When I go to “Reports > Statement of Assets” [and I see all 8 holdings just fine] the share count per holding is only 1% [1/100th] of what I would expect it to be. For example, my transaction history shows a purchase of what I thought was £1000 in Croda International on 8-Sep. In the “Accounts>All transactions” screen I see the line item… but it says I’ve purchased 0.2 shares… and the quote column reads, “4,086.00”. In the “Shares” column for the same holding, I see “0.3” and in the “Market Value” column I see 1,056.36.
The 1,056.36 seems as though it would be correct if this were calibrated for pounds, but the stock holding suggests I’ve purchased GBX and not GBP. But my Deposit Account currency value reads, “GPB”.
I’ve been backwards and forwards through this a couple of times. Clearly I’ve made a mistake, but I haven’t been able to figure out where.
The security can be priced in GBX even though your underlying currency is GBP.
When you set up the security, make sure its currency is the same as that in your source for share prices. If you’re in the UK, CRDA.L should be set up as GBX as it’s quoted in that on Yahoo Finance.
Bigsy, thank you very much for this observation - I think you just identified the problem for me. If I go to “Trades”, find the transaction where I purchased what I thought was £1000 of Croda International and right-click on that line item, if I click “Edit” at that point I get a pop-up window that shows the currency for that security as “GBP”. Your explanation that Yahoo Finance prices UK stocks in GBX is likely why everything is off by two orders of magnitude. Unfortunately, the same popup tells me that because I have recorded trades against this security, I am not able to change the currency.
However, since this is just an experimental portfolio and since I’ve recorded a grand total of 8 trades, I think it would be easiest for me to simply start over from scratch.
I am not sure if any moderator will read this post, but if so it may be helpful for me to point out that the online documentation for “Adding securities” -
here:
does not seem to make the helpful distinction that bigsy pointed out, above. I followed those instructions on a monkey-see, monkey-do basis… but looks like I out-smarted myself. It might be worth making a small addition of a warning to ensure that the reader is aware of this.
I’ve made the same mistake with all the securities I’m following on the LSE, so I think it makes sense to start over.
Sincere thanks to both of you for taking the time to reply.
