Problem correctly registering a stock split

[Zurab Sajaia]

Hi,

I just recently found and started using beancount, and have been having fun converting my old financial records to it. Most of the transaction types I was able to correctly enter and balance but have been unable to figure out what is wrong with one particular item:

I'm trying to record a 8:1 split that happened for GE last year.

2021-08-02 * "Reverse Split GE 1 for 8"

   Assets:Robinhood:GE -37.704432 GE {} @ 12.965 ; three lots with different prices

   Assets:Robinhood:GE 4 GE {103.72 USD}

   Assets:Robinhood:Cash 73.96 USD

So the 32 old stocks were converted into 4 new, and for the residual of (new) 0.713 the cash was paid out.

Now here's the problem, whichever way I tried to turn this transaction I'm not able to balance it, seems like beancount calculates the sale at the cost in the first leg (no matter what price I put after @ it doesn't seem to be used) and therefore says that the transaction is not balanced.

What can I be doing wrong? other than having long fractional quantities and prices, everything else (seems to me) is straight out of the docs... any advice would be appreciated!

Thanks,

Zurab

[Ben Blount]

Hey Zurab - this topic is a pretty frequent one. Take a look at the mailing list archives first and then let us know if you're still having trouble.

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[Zurab Sajaia]

Thanks a lot for the quick response! somehow I had assumed that my transaction syntax was wrong so I had been trying that direction too long, but now realized that it was about properly recreating the new cost basis ...

Managed to balance the transaction finally but had to resort to some (weird to me) operation for the cash-out part - as I had originally three lots, and they only converted full shares and paid for the fractional left over, had to figure out what proportion of that fraction had to come from what lot to correctly get the average price received.

But for now the error is gone so I'll continue moving my other documents into the beancount file :)

Cheers!

[Ben Blount]

Glad you got it sorted out! Yes one of the interesting things for me when adopting beancount was getting a much better understanding of how my brokers were actually logging trades.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/a1a025fe-3642-4886-8052-234e28238196n%40googlegroups.com.

[Red S]

Thanks for reporting back, and well expressed. It would be great if you (or Ben or anyone else so inclined) could update two pieces of documentation on this:

1) Beancount official doc is out of date with the code (doesn't include how to retain original dates):
https://beancount.github.io/docs/trading_with_beancount.html#stock-splits

I'd imagine Martin would be happy give edit access to someone who wants to update it.


These are all closely related from a cookbook perspective, IMHO:

Stock splits, share class conversions, in-kind transfers:
https://groups.google.com/g/beancount/c/vDX1oA2mJXA/m/e-GridwaAQAJ
https://groups.google.com/g/beancount/c/QqnsgzfMeM4/m/hIJlmWclDAAJ


2) It would be nice to have non-beancount-specific things to go into the plain text wiki:
https://github.com/plaintextaccounting/plaintextaccounting/wiki/About-this-wiki