Tracking Investments in Multiple Currencies

Fund Manager can track investments in up to 25 different currencies.  Currency settings are specified in the Currency Settings Dialog.  Currency settings include:

• symbol to display for each currency
• your default currency
• exchange rate between each currency and your default currency

The exchange rate can either be a fixed ratio, or assigned to an "exchange rate" investment.  Using an exchange rate investment offers greater accuracy, as the exchange rate can vary with time.  This tutorial will demonstrate creating and assigning an exchange rate investment.  Fund Manager can then display your investments in either their native currency or your default currency using the "View / Exchange Rate Adjusted" menu command.

Let's assume your default currency is US dollars, and you also own investments bought/sold in Canadian dollars.  First, we need to create an exchange rate investment to track the exchange rate between Canadian and US dollars.  Looking up the exchange rate on Yahoo we find the symbol that describes the number of Canadian dollars for 1 US dollar is USDCAD=X.  Create a new investment similar to this:

Next, we need to assign this exchange rate investment to be used by Fund Manager for converting between Canadian dollars and US dollars.  Select "Options / Currency Settings..." and set the options similar to this:

The closing price for this exchange rate investment (CAD->USD) will be used to convert from Canadian to US dollars.

Every investment has a currency property that can be set when creating the new investment, or adjusted from within the Investment Properties dialog.  All prices and transactions are always entered in an investment's native currency.

The menu command "View / Exchange Rate Adjusted" controls whether investments are displayed in their native currency or in the default currency.  For example, the following report was created with this option OFF:

and this same report is shown with the View / Exchange Rate Adjusted option ON:

In this example the "Clearly Canadian Bev" investment's native currency is Canadian dollars, and the "IBM" investment's currency is US dollars (our assigned default currency).  In the first report both investments are displayed in their native currency.  In the second report the Canadian investment is converted and displayed in our default currency.  Since the exchange rate adjustment investment (USD->CAD) has a recorded closing price on 8/18/2008 of 1.0588 the Canadian dollar value of 1,170 becomes 1,105 when displayed in our default currency (1170 / 1.0588 = 1105).

When first setting up an exchange rate investment you may want to retrieve historical prices for the exchange rate.  See these instructions on retrieving historical exchange rate quotes.

Additional Tutorials:

Getting Started
Using the Portfolio Editor
List of Available Tutorials