Transactions overview

The Transactions view is used to enter, inspect, edit and delete transactions in the selected portfolio.

When no portfolio is selected in the Portfolios view, the Transactions view is empty.

In essence, it consists of a lone Grid object connected to Investment Studio's internal table of transactions in the selected portfolio.

Transactions are crucial to Investment Studio's operation. All asset and portfolio values, and hence all investment performance measures, are computed using the transaction data entered in the Transactions view.

All the view's settings (including the Grid's record definition) are customizable and portfolio-specific. The details are up to you. For a concrete example, consider the following screenshot:

Proceeding from top to bottom, the toolbar contains several controls common to all Grids (e.g.

to open the Grid's record definition editor) plus a few which are specific to the Transactions view. In particular, the leftmost button group,

is used to filter transactions based on asset: when

is depressed (as in the image) the Grid displays all transactions in the portfolio; when it's not, the Grid only displays transactions in the selected asset (here, "LDRS Euro Stoxx50").

All toolbar controls have functional equivalents in the Grid's pop-up menu. Right-click the Grid or the toolbar to open it:

The Grid in the screenshot has been set up to expose most of a transaction's core properties: transaction Nr., Date, number of Units, Principal value and Fees. With the exception of transaction numbers (read-only, assigned automatically when new transaction records are created) these fields are normally all set up to be freely editable.

The Asset and Currency fields display asset properties. Each transaction is assigned to an asset when the transaction record is created, and this assignment is permanent; there is no way to change it later (if you enter a transaction and then discover that you got the asset wrong, delete the transaction, then enter a new one). The Asset field is therefore read-only, and so is the Currency field. Since all transaction values and fees are expressed in the asset's currency, that's what the Grid shows. There is no independent "transaction currency", just the asset's currency.

Since each transaction record describes flows into and out of a single asset, the complete description of what most people would call a "transaction" - the exchange of an asset for another one - requires at least two transaction records.

In the screenshot above, money flows from bank accounts to ETFs (e.g. transactions #3 and #4) and vice versa (e.g. #5 and #6); each such event requires a pair of transaction records to describe it. The advantage of this approach is flexibility. You can choose to track the ETFs, the bank accounts, or both; and you can change your mind later without having to modify the records associated with the "other" asset.

Finally, the Comment field in the screenshot is a custom property added to the transaction table by the Grid's record definition.