Stocks and currencies

[Derek Atkins]

Alpar Juttner <Alpar.Juttner at eth.ericsson.se> writes:

> Here is some stupid questions of a new gnucash user.
> I apologize, if they have already been discussed.
> 
> 1. What is the standard gnucash file extension? Sometimes '.xac' is
> used, but I found it nowhere explicitly mentioned.

Doesn't matter -- gnucash doesn't care.  It will use .xac on backup
data files, and .log on the log files..  But it does not restrict you
in any way.

> 2. Stock accounts have no "currency" in gnucash-1.8.7 (like the
> "security" was in gnucash-1.6.x). How to handle stocks with other than
> the default currency?

What do you mean?  When you are tracking a stock what you care about
is the number of shares of that stock you have.  When you report on
that stock you can report on whatever currency you care about.

If you buy 10 shares of stock for 5 USD, and another 10 shares of
stock for 2.50 CAD, then what you care about is:

        a) You have 20 shares
        b) Latest exchange rate is 2:1 USD
        c) Latest exchange rate is 4:1 CAD

You can then report on whatever currency you care about.

> 3. I don't understand 'stock accounts' at all. Please take a look at the
> gnucash file http://www.cs.elte.hu/~alpar/gnucash/stock.xac for a
> moment. In this example I started with $100,000 cash, then bought 1000
> shares from XYZ for $20,000, and later sold them for $30,000. Now I have
> $110,000 assets with 0 shares. But there is a hidden imbalance here,
> isn't there? I would like to see this $10,000 on an income account. What

This is a known problem and fixed in CVS (see the thread on -devel
about "cap gains" that was announced earlier this week.

> is the legal way to do that? See the other file
> http://www.cs.elte.hu/~alpar/gnucash/stock-corr.xac . This is almost
> right, but it is really a hacking. It seems to me that a stock account
> should count the number of shares _as_well_as_ the "value" of the
> transactions, and special transactions should be enabled that have an
> effect _only_ on the "value balance" (it is not yet enabled as far as I
> see, I had to "emulate" it by buying for extremely high price in the
> second example.)

See above about cap-gains.  Also go read the archives on this list
(and the -devel list) where this topic was discussed at length several
months ago.

> Thank you in advance for your help.
> 
> Alpar

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available