UK Stock Prices in pence

[Jerry]

Hi Mark,
Happy New Year, and thanks for a superb piece of software! FM is by far the best finance software I have ever used.
I have read the various postings on the UK pence subject in the archives, and have used the scaling method to download and convert initial historical prices for my UK stocks correctly. However my laptop is not permanently connected to the Internet, so I do not update prices every day, and need to download historical prices regularly for a large number of UK stocks from the Yahoo Historical server. I know I can download them to a CSV file and manually import them but this takes a long time.
You mentioned in several earlier posts that you might add the option to scale .L stocks from the Yahoo Historical server too. Is there any chance you could add this to the next version of FM? This could be a global setting for all .L stocks from any server, to save modifying it for any new servers in the future. An option to over-ride it for the very few UK stocks that are quoted in pounds would be great (but not essential for me!), e.g. DJAN.L.
Thanks.
Jerry

[Mark]

Hi Jerry,

Thanks for the feedback. The whole handling of .L stocks in pence vs pounds isn't a very good solution now. We're considering adding a scaling property on a per-investment basis. This would be something on the "Investment Properties... / Internet Retrieve" dialog, where you could assign a "multiplier" to be applied to the retrieved value before it is updated in your investment. This would give more flexibility for other odd situations as well. This also eliminates the updating of registry values. If you have any thoughts on this approach or alternative ideas please let me know.

[Jerry]

Mark,
That sounds an excellent solution - thanks!
Would there be a method for users with mainly UK stocks to make a scaling factor of 100 the default for new investments, or would they need to set this manually in the Internet Retrieve dialog for each new investment they create?
Any chance of putting it in version 9.0?
Thanks again!
Jerry

[Mark]

Hi Jerry,

You raise some good points. I'll have to give some thought to how you could set the default for this value. I was thinking it would just default to 1.0, but I can see how in your case you'd prefer it to default to something different. Yes, I think there is a reasonable chance it will be in 9.0.