The Price Editor

The price editor is available from the "Tools" menu. Selecting it brings up the editor:

Each entry in the editor shows a record of a price:

• Commodity: what the price is for.

• Currency: 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.

• Date: when the price is/was for.

• Source: 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.

• Type: 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.<

  • Bid prices indicate what a specialist dealer is prepared to pay for a stock.

  • Ask prices indicates what the dealers are prepared to sell a stock for - naturally, this is slightly higher than the bid price.

  • Last 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.

  • Net Asset Value prices are typically used for mutual funds. They are calculated on the net value of the fund's assets.

  • UnknownAs the name suggests, use this if the type of price quoted is not known.

• Price: the actual price.

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.