Unrelized Gains and Stocks

[Charles M. Gajan]

On Tue, 2006-04-18 at 20:48 -0700, Gregory Novak wrote:
> Is it advisable to do anything regarding stocks and unrealized capital
> gains?  (I read the concepts guide, and there's a nice example
> involving a Degas painting where you have to figure unrealized gains
> manually, but with stocks they sort of happen automatically, so I
> wasn't able to directly apply the painting example.)

Stocks are tracked by share, and the price in the price editor ("get
quotes") so the unrealized gains (losses) are only for the last quote
entered. Unless there is a split, sale or purchases the number of shares
is the number of shares. The only change in value would be at the time
of sale.

> Following some recent advice on this mailing list, I made transfers
> from each of my expense and income accounts to an equity account to
> zero the income/expense accounts.  It occurred to me that maybe I
> should do the same thing for stocks, so that I know just how negative
> my net worth is at the end of 2005 (in order to hopfully climb toward
> positive numbers in 2006).  
> 
> The thing is that I don't see where one end of the transfer would be
> if I did this--I would make a transfer into the equity account, but
> from where?  In the painting example in the concepts guide, it comes
> from Assets:Unrealized Gains, but with stocks the "unrealized gain" is
> encoded in the stock price.  
> 
> It seems to me that maybe this isn't something that you're supposed to
> do.  :-)  Right now, if you take "Starting Balances" + Income -
> Expenses, you get a different answer than if you total up all my
> Assets and Liabilities.  The difference is exactly the capital gains
> on stocks.  
> 
> Thanks,
> Greg
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