Stake Integration Suggestions

In the interest of your software, can I comment/suggest something?

As you may or may not remember I trade US stocks using the Stake platform. Quick backgrounder… The way Stake works is that you transfer say a bulk amount of AU$5000, that then gets converted to US dollars and then you have that US$ pot of money to trade. Example… Let’s say I transfer AUD$5000 to Stake on Jan 1. That immediately is credited to my account in US dollars. Let’s also say that the exchange rate on January 1 was 0.70.

Let’s say I wait two weeks before I make my first US stock purchase, but in that two weeks the exchange rate has gone down to 0.60. I spend the full pot of US dollars on these US stocks on January 14 and I have no cash left in my Stake account.

Let’s also say that after these BUYS, I wish to enter these trades into Navexa.

The way Nevexa currently works is that when opening a portfolio it asks me which country I am a tax resident of. I say Australia. Once the portfolio is set up and I wish to add my trades, I use the Stake importing template, but Stake neither reports the listing exchange nor does it report the exchange rate on the date of the trade. Therefore I have to tediously look up the exchange and exchange rate for each trade I wish to import. This is 1000s of historical trades!

As you may have seen, I yesterday sent an email to Stake to ask them about their current APIs for you. In your discussions with them could you kindly suggest that each trade data export includes a column for Exchange and exchange rate on the date of the trade.

OR…

In the meantime, make import of Stake data not require these two items. It does defeat the purpose of tracking currency but unless the Stake data includes these two items, it is pretty hard for customers to accurately import historical trades.

Apologies that this email is so long but I wanted to be clear in the hope that any API that you adopt Fromm Stake has all relevant data.

Just for Idea’s on the topic this is a note about how Xero handle the issue of multi-currency Xero Process for Multi-Currency

If you’re trying to do this for compliance purposes then when you are holding cash having the cash valued at the current exchange rate make sense but when you purchase a share (Asset) then it needs to be valued at what ever you bought the asset for and when you sell you will also get an exchange rate … then you can work out if the underlying asset made a profit on sale and handle the time in the currency as a different issue… If you did not get your conversion data to base data then having the system pick the exchange rate off a system as Xero does may provide you with an acceptable compliance solution.

I like to think of foreign exchange assets in their local currency and handle conversion back to any base currency… What I really want to be able to do is see my Euro investments in Euro, USD in USD and AUD in AUD and a line down the bottom called Currency… What my accountant most likely wants to see is everything in base currency… So hopefully Navexa can show both for different users…

More and more people are holding FX investments its becoming quite an issue