Stocks and Balancing Accounts

[Daniel Carrera]

Hello,

I want to buy stocks, but I fear that GnuCash won't handle stock prices 
properly. Suppose I own stock XYZ valued at $1050 but GnuCash only has a 
record of me putting in $1000. The other $50 are stock appreciation. In 
this scenario, the accounts won't balance.

In the ideal world, GnuCash should realize that changes in stock prices 
are capital gains or loses, that that's a type of income, and that the 
accounts do balance. But GnuCash won't do that.

How do you deal with this problem?

I encountered a similar problem earlier with currencies. The way I dealt 
with that was to create a bunch of "Currency" accounts. So, for 
instance, if I wanted to exchange $1500 USD for 1000 EUR I would do this:

1. Transfer 1500 USD from "Banks > My US Bank" to "Currency > USD".
2. Transfer 1000 EUR from "Currency > EUR" to "Banks > My EU Bank".

I don't love this method, but it works well enough.

But what do I do with stocks? Do I have to make a separate "Currency" 
account for each and every stock I want to buy? Is that the solution?

Thanks
Daniel