Which of your purchases sells first

In Ruki you choose which purchase a sale comes out of. And when a sale spans several, it works through them oldest first — that's FIFO — and shows you which ones.

You choose which purchase to sell

You open the purchase you want to sell and that's the one that closes. As long as you sell that quantity or less, Ruki decides nothing for you: the field caps at that purchase.

The most common convention is a different one. It's called FIFO, and it treats your oldest purchase as sold. In many tools it's the only one there is, so you're never asked — you sell, and the program decides for you.

It matters because each purchase had its own price and its own date. Which one you treat as sold doesn't change what your position is worth, but it does change how much of your gain or loss is realized and how much stays open.

If you need to sell more than one purchase

That's what the Sell more of this ticker switch is for. It raises the cap to everything you hold of that ticker and splits the sale FIFO: oldest purchases first, no matter which one you started from.

It doesn't happen behind your back. As you type the quantity, Ruki shows you which purchases it will draw from, with each one's date and how much it takes from it.

Every purchase used keeps its own sale record. The gain or loss is still shown purchase by purchase, and also as a ticker average, the way you see it in Portfolio.

What FIFO means

It stands for first in, first out: the first thing in is the first thing out. Applied to a portfolio, your oldest purchase of that asset is the one taken as sold.

In Ruki it isn't the rule but the fallback: it only comes into play when a sale doesn't fit in a single purchase.

How much the result changes

Say you bought the same stock twice: 10 shares in March at USD 150 and 10 in September at USD 220. You put in USD 3,700 in all. Today it trades at USD 200 and you sell 10.

You sold the same quantity, at the same price, on the same day. Both rows leave you in the same place: USD 4,000 between what you cashed in and what you still hold, USD 300 more than you put in. What changes completely is how much of that 300 is already realized and how much is still open.

And it doesn't stop there. What stays open has a different cost basis depending on which one you sold: sell the March purchase and you are left with a position at a cost of 220; sell the September one and you are left with a position at a cost of 150. The same quantity of the same stock, and two different returns from here on.

That's why Ruki doesn't decide on its own. If the tool exists to show you how each purchase did, which one you sold can't be the program's call.

When you import, it's always FIFO

Your broker's file has the sale but doesn't say which purchase it came out of: that isn't in the file. So when importing, Ruki assigns from the oldest purchase to the newest.

If you want a sale to come out of a different purchase, add it by hand from the app instead of importing it.

This doesn't set how much tax you pay

Ruki is a tracking tool: what it keeps is your history, not your tax filing. How a sale is taxed is set by the rules that apply to you and by what your broker and your accountant report — not by which purchase you took it from here.

If you need the figure for a tax return, ask your accountant with your broker's statements in hand.