Stocks and currencies

[gh]

On Wednesday 24 September 2003 04:24, Alpar Juttner wrote:
> 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.

Cannot help you there

> 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?
> 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
> 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.)

I have not looked at your links but:

I think the problem is how are you setting up your transactions in GC:

http://www.gnucash.org/docs/v1.8/C/gnucash-guide/invest_sell1.html

Regarding investments accounts in a different currency is all about setting 
the right account structure (assuming, for example, that your default 
currency is USD): 
Assests (USD)
---->Investment account (EUR)
-------->Cash at investment account (EUR)
-------->Stock1 (Stock1)
-------->Stock2 (Stock2)
-------->etc

Income (USD)
--Realized gains from investment account (EUR)

Hope that gets you started.

gh