FX Foreign Exchange Spot trades and positions

[Nisse]

I am looking for a recommendation on how to best record FX spot transactions and how to follow the value of the position. I tried to set up a sub portfolio, without a default currency account, and simply have one investment defined per currency (with currency set accordingly). My thinking was to record an FX trade as a buy in one currency and a sell in the other. For example if I am going short EURUSD I would record a sell in the EUR investment and a buy in the USD investment (i.e if the FX rate is 1.25 I would record a sell of 1000 EUR and a buy of 1250 USD). However, this does not seem to work. The values in the sub portfolio are not converted to the default currency and summary fields in all reports show N/A.

I made an alternative setup making with a default cash account for the settlement currency and created an investment for the transaction currency, having the transaction currency tied to the fx rate (example settlement currency USD as default cash account and transaction currency EUR tied to EURUSD:CUR). This seems to work, but then I will have to have a separate sub portfolio for every settlement currency.

Is there a better way to do this? (I have investments in many currencies and use multiple currency templates as per FM recommendations. This all works fine.)

[Mark]

Hi Nisse,

Your first method should work fine. Make sure your investments in the non-default currencies are:

1) Assigned to the desired non-default currency (Investment Properties...)
2) Not assigned as "Exchange Rate" for their "Investment Type" (Investment Properties...)
3) Not assigned as the exchange rate investment under "Options / Currency Settings..."

Once you do all this, turn on "View / Exchange Rate Adjusted", and your totals should display.

[Nisse]

Hi, I had set the Investment Type to Exchange Rate, which I now corrected and everything works like charm.