Foreign investment problems

[Danny Ciarniello]

Derek Atkins wrote:

> Hi,
>
> USD isn't a Stock..  If you have a stock, you need to use a commodity
> to track that stock.  If you've got USD, then you don't have a stock.
>
> So, which is it?  Are you trying to track a USD account, or a Stock
> account?
>
> Note that even a mutual fund "denoted" in USD (like the Vanguard
> Treasury MMF) is still a "Fund" with it's own non-USD symbol.  It's
> price is always $1, but it's still not USD.
>
>  
>
I appreciate the USD isn't a Stock.  Maybe I wasn't entirely clear with 
the problem.  When I create a new file and use the wizard to create a 
set of Investment accounts, I get an account tree like:

Assets
- Investments
-- Brokerage Account
--- Bond
--- Stock
--- Market Index
--- Mutual Fund

plus, of course, the Income and Expense trees.  When I right-click and 
select Edit Account, the settings for each account are:

Assets : Type Asset, Commodity CAD
Investments : Type Asset, Commodity CAD
Brokerage Account : Type Bank, Commodity CAD
Bond : Type Stock, Commodity CAD
Stock : Type Stock, Commodity CAD
Market Index : Type Mutual Fund, Commodity CAD
Mutual Fund : Type Mutual Fund, Commodity CAD

As one can see, all accounts have commodity set to CAD.
In this account setup, it is apparent that the Stock account (not to 
mention the others) is not meant to track a particular commodity but is, 
instead, meant to group together accounts that represent individual 
stocks.  E. g. If I were to own Nortel shares, then I would create an 
account, NT, that is a sub-account of Stock to hold the Nortel shares.

The problem lies when I try to recreate this tree, in my case for a 
different currency but it could be for a different brokerage account as 
well.  When I try to replicate the "Stock" account, GnuCash insists on 
my selecting a commodity but that commodity can't be a currency.  I 
understand why it might be incorrect to try to select a currency as a 
commodity for a Stock account but if it is incorrect for me to do so, 
then it is also incorrect for GnuCash to do so.
To deal with the problem, one has to create a dummy commodity for the 
Stock account.  This inconsistency leads to confusion especially when 
something doesn't seem to work right.  I am a GnuCash newbie so when I 
saw that transfers from my US Opening Balances account did not have the 
correct balance, I thought that the problem was because I had not been 
able to set up the accounts the same way as the wizard had.

Dan.