Record a sale of stock

[Daniel Hannum]

I've been using Gnucash for a year now, and I'm impressed. Great job!

However, it seems to be lacking in one area.  Consider buying and 
selling stock. I buy $100 of stock, so I transfer $100 from my bank 
account into a stock account that is using a particular commodity (that 
I defined). Now suppose that the price of that commodity increases so 
that my investment is now worth $200. I can now sell the stock by 
transferring $200 out of that stock account back into my bank account.

And just like that, my books are no longer balanced. Gnucash has allowed 
me to increase my assets by $100 without recording any income.

I am not sure if I am misunderstanding something. Please set me straight 
if that is the case. I believe this is an issue and it has come up 
previously on the list. People say "code to do this is being worked on."

Thus, my question is not to bitch and moan "why isn't it done?". What 
I'm asking is whether or not it is worth my time to create the accounts 
and commodities for my investments and record every tiny purchase at 
various prices. My 401k has me buying various funds at slightly 
different prices each week, so it's non-trivial to retroactively record 
these previous purchases. If it allows me to track the value of my 
portfolio, then it's worth it. But since I can't record any sale of 
stock, I am concerned that the future code changes to fix that might 
deprecate the purchase data. (For example, I might have to enter it all 
over again in a different format or something)

thanks for your time and effort it making Gnucash as good as it is

dan