Hi, Trading accounts do not show you UNREALIZED gains. They exist to help you balance out REALIZED gains once you have a sale transaction.
-derek On Wed, February 21, 2018 12:00 pm, Keith Bellairs wrote: > 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. > -- Derek Atkins 617-623-3745 de...@ihtfp.com www.ihtfp.com Computer and Internet Security Consultant _______________________________________________ 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.
