Stocks, gains/losses, do I really have to calculate them by hand?

[David Carlson]

On 4/22/2012 11:33 AM, David Carlson wrote:
> On 4/22/2012 10:25 AM, John Ralls wrote:
>> On Apr 22, 2012, at 7:30 AM, Fredrik Persson wrote:
>>
>>> Let's assume I have an account with Stock X, where I buy and sell
>>> frequently. It can be difficult to know exactly what gain, or loss, a trade
>>> has generated. According to the concepts guide, I need to calculate this by
>>> hand:
>>>
>>> http://www.gnucash.org/docs/v2.4/C/gnucash-guide/invest-sell1.html#invest-sellexample2
>>>
>>> While this is trivial in the case described in in the link above, it's a
>>> lot more difficult if you've bought and sold a number of times.
>>>
>>> Do I really have to do this calculation by hand? Or does gnucash have
>>> support for automatically calculating gains and losses from the
>>> transactions alone?
>>>
>>> Thanks in advance!
>> There's the Lots mechanism [1], but it can handle only FIFO, makes a separate transaction for the gains, and the account that it puts the gains splits into is hard-coded with a weird name.  I've used it a few times and gone back to doing it by hand.
>>
>> Don't forget that gnucash will do calculations for you in numeric fields. There's no need to pull out a calculator.
>>
>> Regards,
>> John Ralls
>>
>> [1] http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Concept_of_Lots
>>
>>
> Fredrik,
>
> Check the archives
> https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user at the end of
> March for a thread called Selling Stock for some discussion about how to
> implement your transaction entries.  I personally had some difficulty
> with getting GnuCash to complete them correctly until I practiced a lot.
>
> David Carlson
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> gnucash-user mailing list
> gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user
> -----
> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
Sorry, I gave a bad link to the archives.  It should be
https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user

David Carlson
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 0xDC7C8BF3.asc
Type: application/pgp-keys
Size: 1729 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/attachments/20120422/451bfabe/attachment.bin>