just a curiosity, I would like to understand one little thing.
Can anyone clarify why when you buy a new security in the “Transaction” details you can always see 6 digits decimals when the security is “Awaiting settlement”, however, after the purchase becomes “Settled” the shares are rounded to 4 decimal digits.
What do you actually owned? 6 digits shown before or 4 digits precision shown after. It can make quite a difference in the long run for some securities.
Is it just a UI reporting issue in the platform or the owned shares are actually rounded to 4 digits?
If my question is not clear, here an example of what I mean by that:
This will be related to the UI - The underlying records are held to 6dp and you’ll be able to see this in the full valuation reports. I wasn’t aware of the settled stock showing to 4dp - I’ll have to look into this and get back to you.
(My first thought was that we were not displaying the trailing 0’s but its not that)
I feel your pain. I also tallied up a huge discrepancy due to inconsistent decimal points. I replicate all transactions on Google Finance portfolio and after a few transaction entries these shortened and/or rounded up decimal points starts adding up to a different total share quantity sum. Moneywise is is quite a few quid discrepancy. It would be nice to have a standardised decimal fraction. Off the top of my head platforms like freetrade uses 8 decimals and lightyear uses 9. This makes for accurate accounting.
I would really appreciate it if InvestEngine can implement a similar consistent standard.
@tom.winterton Actually even the full quarterly report has 4dp, I have checked it today.
It would be nice to have as much precision as possible in all reports (both in the console and documents) 6dp/8dp/9dp whatever is possible.
I’ve done a bit more digging into this. You’re right the quarterly reports do only show 4dp apologies I was mistaken. If you go on the dashboard and click on the ETF holding itself you will see the full positions to 6 dp. Our systems & record split fractional shares to 6dp.
Now to the why & a bit of background? (bit technical / dry)
When we trade fractionally we allow shares to be split into 1 / 10,000th of a share as the smallest unit. That’s a design decision and so by extension our systems & record split fractional shares to 6dp.
On the UI in some instance (especially on mobile) we’ve need to limited it to 4dp for visual reason
We also have a 2nd system driving some of the emails/Transaction screens. This system’s default to displaying 4dp for settled stock (Still investigating why this is)
Because of how we’ve designed our fractional shares - we’ll never show 8 or 9dp (as this would just show trailing 00’s and add no value). That said I agree we should be trying to show 6 dp of precision where ever we can.
I’m going to look at getting some amends on our roadmap (the email + reports).
I was also concerned by this problem, as an official statement must be exact and not an approximation.
I have generated a new transaction statement this today and it shows the number of shares I bought with 6dp, which is what we want. So I think the transaction statements have been sorted.
But I also generated a valuation statement and it still shows the number of shares with only 4dp, so this is not the exact figure. These are official documents that we may need to use to determine things such as capital gains liabilities, or doing some financial planning, so we need to have the exact numbers.
Without these, the numbers will not add up correctly and it can cause a lot of pain trying to get things right. And I cannot imagine that updating the software to show the full 6dp number would be that difficult. So can you please get this sorted ?
. The more precision the better also for me.