Adding Investments to Your AccountTo add individual securities to your Investment Account, navigate to the view, select the tab, and choose the Investment account where the investment is held from the Select Account drop-down box.
Right-click the mouse in the empty space in the view. This brings up the context menu. Choose from this menu. This launches the New Investment Wizard which you use to create your new Investment.
The first thing you'll be asked to enter is the type of investment, whether it's a stock, bond, etc.
Next, the investment details page is presented. The following information is entered on this page:
Trading Symbol. A trading or ticker symbol is an abbreviation used to identify a publicly traded security of a particular instrument on a particular stock market exchange. KMyMoney requires a trading symbol for all securities; however some investments do not have symbols. In this case, you will need to make up a symbol for it.
Full name. The friendly, readable name of the investment you're creating, e.g., “Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.” This name is also referred to as the security.
Fraction. This indicates the degree of precision to which your holdings are measured. For example, in the US most mutual funds measure holdings to three decimal places, so you would enter 1000 in this field. Stocks are often measured to only whole units, so you could enter 1 for a stock like this. You'll want to mirror the same decimal places that your brokerage uses to record your securities so the transactions amounts match within KMyMoney. Using extra precision will not cause a problem, but using too little precision can cause rounding errors which can make KMyMoney unable to exactly match the information shown by your brokerage institution.
Trading market. Where the stock trades. This is an optional field which is provided for your convenience. This information is not used anywhere else within KMyMoney.
Identification. An optional field to enter additional identification information you might like to keep track of. Again, this information is not used anywhere else.
Trading currency. The market exchange currency in which this investment trades. This is typically the country that the security trades within. It is usually, but not necessarily, the same as the default currency for the Investment account holding that security.
Price entry. Choose whether the price will be entered as the price per share or as the total for all shares when entering a transaction.
If you are using Online Quotes, ensure that the symbol exactly matches the symbol used by your quote source. Yahoo covers most of the world's markets, and requires a suffix on the end of symbols outside the US, to specify the country or market. For example, Rubicon Limited on the New Zealand market should be entered as “RBC.NZ”.
Finally, you're presented with the Online Update screen. This is where you tell KMyMoney how you would like to update the prices of your investment. The following items are set here:
Use Finance::Quote. This is an option for GnuCash users who are used to this style of quotes. Most users can leave this unchecked.
Online Source. The online source you'd like to use for this particular investment. The most common choice is “Yahoo”. Try that first, and if the investment cannot be found using this source, then experiment with the others.
Factor. A multiplier that should be applied to quotes retrieved for this investment. This is most commonly needed for UK stocks where the price quoted is in pence (1/100), and the stock is denominated in pounds. In this case, enter 0,01 for the Factor.
Note
This section has been added just in time for the release of Version 5.0.8. The author felt it was important to include at least the basic information now, since this topic has been a source of difficulty for some time. The discussion will be expanded and screenshots of the New Security Wizard will be added as soon as possible.
It is possible to own shares of the same security in different investment accounts, such as a regular investment account and also a retirement account. If you follow the instructions above, you will have that security show up in both accounts, but KMyMoney will actually treat them as if each of the securities is a different underlying equity. This results in duplicate storage, such as having two copies of the entire price history of the equity. Therefore, you may prefer to have both securities refer to the same underlying equity.
When you add a security to an investment account, and that security already exists in another investment account, you need to be careful if you want to reuse it rather than creating a new, duplicate security. When you see the New Investment Wizard, after selecting the type of investment and clicking , you need to be sure the Full Name field is empty before entering the Trading Symbol. When you hit Tab, if KMyMoney already has a security using that symbol, it will ask if you wish to reuse it. If you click , it will fill in the rest of that dialog, and you can then just click .