Exchange Rate Impact Reversed?

GBiasini

Vidas,

I have Canadian and US stocks in the portfolio that I am tracking with Portfolio Slicer. In looking at reports, I set the report currency to Canadian dollars. However, when the Canadian dollar weakens, i.e. I get more Canadian dollars for my US dollar stock, the exchange rate impact is reported as negative whereas I should have thought that it would have been positive. As well, when the Canadian dollar strengthens, so I expect fewer Canadian dollars for each US $, the report shows a positive exchange rate impact rather than negative as I expected.

Have I got that backwards?

Regards,
Gary

VidasMatelis

Gary,

Exchange rate impact is always calculated against the currency that has CurrencyID =1 (Excel workbook, src worksheet, table Currency - columns N and O). In your case I assume you setup CAD with CurrencyID=1.
Any investments (cash and symbols) with the same currency as CurrencyID=1 (CAD) has no impact when calculating "Exch Rate Impact".
Let us look at the simple case - you have an account with 1000USD in cash(!) on 2016-12-31.
On 2016-12-31 USD->CAD exchange rate was 1.3427
On 2017-08-29 USD-CAD exchange rate was 1.2514
In PS report "Total value" for your investments in CAD would be:
2016-12-31: 1342.70CAD
2017-08-29: 1251.40CAD
Exch Rate Impact would be: 1251.40-1342.70 = -91.3
The negative number for Exch Rate Impact means that your calculated "Total value" of investments in Primary Currency (CAD) was reduced by 91.3CAD just because of the Exchange Rate change.

With stock investment there is the same logic, just a bit more complicated because you have stock price change over time and exchange rate change over the same time.

Does that make sense?

GBiasini

Vidas, When I moved the data from an Excel 2013 spreadsheet to a 2016 spreadsheet, I neglected to change the CurrencyID=1 to CDN. All is now fixed.

Thanks.