treatment of unrealized gain/loss on stock holdings?

[Alan Su]

hi all,

in the gnucash tutorial/guide, i see the trusty old accounting invariant:

  Assets - Liabilities = Equity + (Income - Expenses)

If one is diligent about avoiding Imbalance-XXX and Orphan-XXX
entries, this holds true in gnucash...until you add stock holdings
into the mix and update their prices.  at that point, you effectively
have an unrealized gain/loss that corresponds to the
appreciation/depreciation of your holding.  this effectively throws
the above equation out of whack: the value of the asset goes up
without a corresponding credit to an account.  how are folks dealing
with this?  manual updates to unrealized gain/loss accounts for each
position, as is being discussed on another gnucash-user thread?

it seems to me that there should be an equity account called "accrued
value" that is basically

   sum(value_of_stocks) - sum(original_cash_basis_of_stocks)

that gets automatically adjusted when stock quotes (and mutual fund
quotes too, i guess) get updated.  (writing these adjustements as
equity may not be the "right thing," but booking appreciation as
income seems incorrect as well.)  i think it would be great if such an
account could be maintained on a per-position basis, but that's just
my opinion.  i'd be curious to hear what others' strategies are for
dealing with this discrepancy (even if it's just "i'm ignoring
unrealized gain/loss until the sale" =)).

thanks,

-alan