Stock trades and realized gains/losses

[Linas Vepstas]

On Fri, Jan 10, 2003 at 01:53:29PM -0600, Matthew Vanecek was heard to remark:
> > Stock accounts do not have currencies.  This is an old and broken 
> > pradigm left over from gnucash-1.2/1.4 which is supposed to be 
> > eradicated real soon now.
> 
> They *should* have currencies. It's not broken at all.  

Arghhh.   I'll try to reconstruct the argument at the bottom of this
email.  ideally, it should be in some design.txt for reference.

> What's broken is
> that I cannot look at my stock account and see how much money I've
> invested in that account. 

I agree, this is why I am frustrated.  Quadruply so since it worked fine
in gnucash-1.2, and got busted and never fixed, due to theoretical
discussions debated years ago. Grrr...

> Because, as I've said before, the current implementation prevents me
> from entering an adjustment transaction and maintaining an unrealized
> gains/loss account.  If I have an unrealized loss, it means that the
> value of the shares has decreased, not the quantity.  And I cannot show
> that currently.

Yes, OK, This was one of the things I was trying to accomplish with
Lots, and as derek points out, I am not sure if the idea of 'double
balance' really made it in there.  I am confusing myself with the 
right way of balancing an 'adjusting transaction'.

> This seems to all be based on differing philosophies about stock
> valuation.  You 

[...]

> Others (like myself, 

[...]

> wish to see

[...]

Careful.  I've been very frustrated, for years, about the fact that 
the stock accounts in GnuCash are almost useless.   It makes me mean
spiritied and argumentative. 

-------------------------------------------------
The reason that the 'account currency' got deprecated is because 
people wanted to do multi-currency transactions.  In earlier versions
of gnucash, multi-currency transactions were treated in a manner similar
to shares of stock, with a rather confusing ledger, and the need to use 
a 'currency trading account'.

By moving the currency out of the account and into the transaction,
it enabled direct bank-to-bank transfers between different currencies.
But there were supposed to be corresponding changes to the ledger,
which I think were never made.  The result is that the ledger is still
confusing.

Coupled to this is that some new confusing issues showed up as to 
what it means to have multi-currency transactions balance.   I thought
that I solved these with Lots, as well as all the depreciation &
gains/losses questions.   But I find today that I am confusing 
myself about how to balance the 'adjustment transaction'.  When 
I'm done being confused, I'll try to write up what was supposed to
be the answer.  Unless, of course, you provide an alternate framework
first.

--linas



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pub  1024D/01045933 2001-02-01 Linas Vepstas (Labas!) <linas@linas.org>
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