I started looking at using trading accounts but I may be missing something.
The trading account created by gnucash for a stock shows as a balance the number of shares in the account. This is also the balance shown in the asset account for that stock. Transactions for all stocks post to the USD (in my case) trading account. So the USD trading account seems to show the aggregate of purchases, sales, gains. losses etc. of all the stocks - sort of like the amount of money I have on the table for trading. But I would rather see the realized gains in an income account. And I can see the total unrealized gain(loss) in an advanced portfolio report. I had guessed that unrealized gains would somehow be reflected in the trading account when the value of the underlying security is updated. In that way the trading account would look like the marginable value of my stocks. Then I looked at the documentation. The examples only show realized gains being posted. So again, the actual asset account for a security provides me more info. I guess I could manually post unrealized gain to the trading account each time I look up the price of a security, since the Trading Account - USD does not have to match the real amount of cash on hand. In the end I do not see that I get anything from using trading accounts. I can see that they would be useful for currency if I had to track the exchange rate on every foreign currency transaction. But the IRS lets me use an average rate for my CDN income(expense). Am I using trading accounts wrong? Keith _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list gnucash-user@gnucash.org To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user If you are using Nabble or Gmane, please see https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists for more information. ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
