
  <article id="xacc-price-editor">
    <artheader>
      <title>Updating Share Prices and Currency Values</title>
    </artheader>
    <sect1>
      <title>Introduction</title>
      <para>When trading currencies, mutual funds, or stocks, and trying to
	track the growth of your investment, you need to be able to
	keep track of the value of those things. The <emphasis>price
	  editor</emphasis> provides a unified  interface for doing
	just that.
      </para>
    </sect1>
    <sect1>
      <title>
	The Price Editor
      </title>
      <para>The price editor is available from the "Tools" menu. Selecting
	it brings up the editor:</para>
      
      <para><emphasis>PICTURE NEEDED</emphasis></para>
      
      <para>Each entry in the editor shows a record of a price:</para>
      <itemizedlist>
	<listitem>
	  <para><emphasis>Commodity</emphasis>: what the price  is
	    for.
	  </para>
	</listitem>
	<listitem>
	  <para>
	    <emphasis>Currency</emphasis>: what the price is recorded
	    in.  To take a simple example, IBM stock's commodity is
	    IBM, and the currency would be USD, as prices are almost
	    always quoted in US dollars.
	  </para>
	</listitem>
	<listitem>
	  <para>
	    <emphasis>Date</emphasis>: when the price is/was
	    for.
	  </para>
	</listitem>
	<listitem>
	  <para>
	    <emphasis>Source</emphasis>: where the price quote
	  came from.  Typically, this will be either "user:price-editor"
	    (indicating you entered it directly) or "Finance::Quote",
	    indicating that it was retrieved from an online source by
	    the Finance::Quote module that GnuCash uses for this task.
	  </para>
	</listitem>
	<listitem>
	  <para>
	    <emphasis>Type</emphasis>: There are several different
	    types of stock price quotes, and to explain the technicalities
	    requires a little understanding of the stock market.  Most
	    stocks, on most markets, have specialist dealers who are 
	    almost always willing to buy and sell that stock, and
	    make a little profit along the way by by buying and selling
	    at slightly different prices.<
	    </para>
	  
	  <itemizedlist>
	    <listitem>
	      <para><emphasis>Bid</emphasis> prices indicate what 
		a specialist  dealer is prepared to pay for a stock.
	      </para>
	    </listitem>
	    <listitem>
	      <para><emphasis>Ask</emphasis> prices indicates what
		the dealers are prepared to sell a stock for - naturally,
		this is slightly higher than the bid price.
	      </para>
	    </listitem>
	    <listitem>
	      <para><emphasis>Last</emphasis> prices indicate the
		    price at which the last trade in that stock/security
		  occurred at.  This is the price most commonly
		  quoted in the media.
	      </para>
	    </listitem>
	    <listitem>
	      <para><emphasis>Net Asset Value</emphasis> prices
		are typically used for mutual funds.  They are calculated
		on the net value of the fund's assets.
	      </para>
	    </listitem>
	    <listitem>
	      <para><emphasis>Unknown</emphasis>As the name suggests,
		use this if the type of price quoted is not known.
	      </para>
	    </listitem>
	  </itemizedlist>
	</listitem>
	<listitem>
	  <para>
	    <emphasis>Price</emphasis>: the actual price.
	  </para>
	</listitem>
      </itemizedlist>
      <para>
	You can choose how you'd like the list of prices sorted by
	clicking on the appropriate "Sort by . . ." radio button
	directly below the price list.
      </para>
    </sect1>

    <sect1>
      <title>
	Updating prices manually
      </title>
      <para>To add a new price, click on "Add", and enter the details
	of the price into the dialog box.  Similarly, to edit an
	existing price, click on the price in the price list, click the
	"Edit" button, and edit the figures.</para>
      <para>
	To remove just one price, just click the "Remove button", 
	or, if you want to remove all prices older than a certain time,
	Click on the "Remove Old..." button and use the dialog box.
	</para>
    </sect1>
    
    <sect1>
      <title>
	Getting quotes online
      </title>
      <para>
      GnuCash is able to get quotes online from a variety of sources,
      through the Finance::Quote module.  To support online quotations
      for a particular stock or mutual fund account, you must first 
      enable online price quoting and select a price source.  
      You can do this in the <link linkend="xacc-accountedit">edit account
	</link>
	dialog box.  More details on exactly how to choose a price
	source can be found in the <link linkend="xacc-price-sources">
	  price sources</link> help entry.
      </para>
      <para>
      Once that is done, you can update prices for your stocks and 
      mutual funds by clicking the "get quotes" button.
      </para>

      <para>
	If you wish to update price quotes from the command line, 
	you can do so by the following command
      </para>
      <para>
	gnucash --add-price-quotes &lt;gnucash-file&gt;
      </para>
      
      <para>
	GnuCash 1.4 had a helper script for getting price quotes,
	but this is no longer needed.
      </para>
    </sect1>

</article>

<!-- Local variables: -->
<!-- sgml-parent-document: "gnucash.sgml" -->
<!-- End: -->
