BeanCounter(3pm)					User Contributed Perl Documentation					  BeanCounter(3pm)

NAME

       Finance::BeanCounter - Module for stock portfolio performance functions.

SYNOPSIS

	use Finance::BeanCounter;

DESCRIPTION

       Finance::BeanCounter provides functions to download, store and analyse stock market data.

       Downloads are available of current (or rather: 15 or 20 minute-delayed) price and company data as well as of historical price data.  Both
       forms can be stored in an SQL database (for which we currently default to PostgreSQL though MySQL is supported as well; furthermore any
       database reachable by means of an ODBC connection should work).

       Analysis currently consists of performance and risk analysis. Performance reports comprise a profit-and-loss (or 'p/l' in the lingo) report
       which can be run over arbitrary time intervals such as "--prevdate 'friday six months ago' --date 'yesterday'" -- in essence, whatever the
       wonderful Date::Manip module understands -- as well as dayendreport which defaults to changes in the last trading day. A risk report show
       parametric and non-parametric value-at-risk (VaR) estimates.

       Most available functionality is also provided in the reference implementation beancounter, a convenient command-line script.

       The API might change and evolve over time. The low version number really means to say that the code is not in its final form yet, but it
       has been in use for well over four years.

       More documentation is in the Perl source code.

DATABASE LAYOUT

       The easiest way to see the table design is to look at the content of the setup_beancounter script. It creates the five tables stockinfo,
       stockprices, fxprices, portfolio and indices. Note also that is supports the creation of database for both PostgreSQL and MySQL.

   THE STOCKINFO TABLE
       The stockinfo table contains general (non-price) information and is index by symbol:

		   symbol	       varchar(12) not null,
		   name 	       varchar(64) not null,
		   exchange	       varchar(16) not null,
		   capitalisation      float4,
		   low_52weeks	       float4,
		   high_52weeks        float4,
		   earnings	       float4,
		   dividend	       float4,
		   p_e_ratio	       float4,
		   avg_volume	       int4

       This table is updated by overwriting the previous content.

   THE STOCKPRICES TABLE
       The stockprices table contains (daily) price and volume information. It is indexed by both date and symbol:

		   symbol	       varchar(12) not null,
		   date 	       date,
		   previous_close      float4,
		   day_open	       float4,
		   day_low	       float4,
		   day_high	       float4,
		   day_close	       float4,
		   day_change	       float4,
		   bid		       float4,
		   ask		       float4,
		   volume	       int4

       During updates, information is appended to this table.

   THE FXPRICES TABLE
       The fxprices table contains (daily) foreign exchange rates. It can be used to calculate home market values of foreign stocks:

		   currency	       varchar(12) not null,
		   date 	       date,
		   previous_close      float4,
		   day_open	       float4,
		   day_low	       float4,
		   day_high	       float4,
		   day_close	       float4,
		   day_change	       float4

       Similar to the stockprices table, it is index on date and symbol.

   THE STOCKPORTFOLIO TABLE
       The portfolio table contains contains the holdings information:

		   symbol	       varchar(16) not null,
		   shares	       float4,
		   currency	       varchar(12),
		   type 	       varchar(16),
		   owner	       varchar(16),
		   cost 	       float(4),
		   date 	       date

       It is indexed on symbol,owner,date.

   THE INDICES TABLE
       The indices table links a stock symbol with one or several market indices:

		   symbol	       varchar(12) not null,
		   stockindex	       varchar(12) not null

BUGS

       Finance::BeanCounter and beancounter are so fresh that there are only missing features :)

       On a more serious note, this code (or its earlier predecessors) have been in use since the fall of 1998.

       Known bugs or limitations are documented in TODO file in the source package.

SEE ALSO

       beancounter.1, smtm.1, Finance::YahooQuote.3pm, LWP.3pm, Date::Manip.3pm

COPYRIGHT

       Finance::BeanCounter.pm	(c) 2000 -- 2006 by Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd@debian.org>

       Updates to this program might appear at http://eddelbuettel.com/dirk/code/beancounter.html.

       This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
       the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.  There is NO warranty whatsoever.

       The information that you obtain with this program may be copyrighted by Yahoo! Inc., and is governed by their usage license.  See
       http://www.yahoo.com/docs/info/gen_disclaimer.html for more information.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

       The Finance::YahooQuote module by Dj Padzensky (on the web at http://www.padz.net/~djpadz/YahooQuote/) served as the backbone for data
       retrieval, and a guideline for the extension to the non-North American quotes which was already very useful for the real-time ticker
       http://eddelbuettel.com/dirk/code/smtm.html.

perl v5.10.1							    2010-06-13							  BeanCounter(3pm)