Dealing With Different Currencies?

[(PeteCresswell)]

I'm thinking ISO 4217 as shown on
http://www.xe.com/iso4217.php

Bond trading system.

Users are definitely OK with all of a given security's trades
being restricted to a single currency.

They currently claim to even be ok with all of a given fund or
portfolio's trades being restricted to a single currency -
although my alarms flickered briefly when I heard that one...

What comes to mind:
-------------------------------------------------------------
- Show amounts suffixed by the 3-character ISO 4217 currency code

e.g. 3,002,400.33 USD
10,000,000.00 EUR
9.500,000.00 CAD

- Don't bother trying to format using the currency's symbol
e.g. $30,000.0 would not appear anywhere. Instead,
one would see 30,000 USD.

- When the first trade for a given security is committed, the
currency chosen on that trade's buy ticket determines the
currency for all subsequent trades against that security - or
maybe even for all trades within that fund or portfolio.

- I'm taking it as a matter of faith that now that we're
all in the 21st century, all currencies are going tb decimal.

- When we do reports, we section each report by currency and
don't allow any totals that include multiple currencies.
--------------------------------------------------------------

First problem I see is valuation of a fund whose securities have
been traded in multiple currencies. My initial reaction to that
would be to hope that the user's claim that all the securities in
a given fund will be traded in a single currency proves tb true.

Anybody actually been here and lived with the consequences?

Architecture?

Gotchas?
--
PeteCresswell
--
PeteCresswell

[David W. Fenton]

"(PeteCresswell)" <[e-mail] in
news:6g********************************@4ax.com:

First problem I see is valuation of a fund whose securities have
been traded in multiple currencies. My initial reaction to that
would be to hope that the user's claim that all the securities in
a given fund will be traded in a single currency proves tb true.

If you can come up with some way of getting current exchange rates,
you could at least calculate the value of a mixed-currency fund for
a particular day. There are certainly plenty of websites that offer
currency conversion rates, but you'd need something reliable that
provides a web service that could be consumed by your app.

I really don't see an issue, myself.

This might be one of those cases where you'd want to store
conversion rate on a particular date so that you'd have historical
valuation.

--
David W. Fenton http://www.dfenton.com/
usenet at dfenton dot com http://www.dfenton.com/DFA/

[Tom van Stiphout]

On 19 Apr 2008 18:40:56 GMT, "David W. Fenton"
<XX*******@dfenton.com.invalidwrote:

That's pretty much exactly what we are doing for a US client that
operates worldwide and may get partial payments in several currencies
for the same job.
We subscribe to a webservice which we call once a day and store the
currencies in a table.
When a payment is received we convert to USD and record the conversion
rate used (there may not be one on that day, so a business rule will
get the most appropriate rate).

-Tom.

>"(PeteCresswell)" <[e-mail] in
news:6g********************************@4ax.com :

>First problem I see is valuation of a fund whose securities have
been traded in multiple currencies. My initial reaction to that
would be to hope that the user's claim that all the securities in
a given fund will be traded in a single currency proves tb true.

If you can come up with some way of getting current exchange rates,
you could at least calculate the value of a mixed-currency fund for
a particular day. There are certainly plenty of websites that offer
currency conversion rates, but you'd need something reliable that
provides a web service that could be consumed by your app.

I really don't see an issue, myself.

This might be one of those cases where you'd want to store
conversion rate on a particular date so that you'd have historical
valuation.