Question about selling stocks

[Derek Atkins]

"Matheus Leite" <matheus at longadata.com> writes:

> Hi, I am new to gnucash and I am considering using it to track my investments.
>
> Reading the online manual there is one thing which I don't understand
> regarding selling stocks. The example there displays a situation where
> you buy a certain quantity of shares for a certain price and later
> sells all these shares for a higher price, characterizing a profit
> gain. It's recorded in gnucash as a split transaction and the user
> needs to know the buying price beforehand
> (http://www.gnucash.org/docs/v2.0/C/gnucash-guide/invest-sell1.html).
>
> In a more realistic scenario, one buy and sells shares of the same
> stock multiple times and it's hard to know what was the buying price.
> How could I manage stock selling in gnucash, for example, if I bought
> 100, 200, 50 and 150 shares of, say, Amazon stocks, at different times
> and prices, and later I want to sell them all together? Do I have to
> calculate the profit by hand before entering the transaction in
> gnucash?

If you're selling them all at once then you already know your cost
basis so it's pretty easy to compute by hand.  But yes, right now
(unfortunately) you have to calculate the profit by hand before entering
the transaction into gnucash.

> Thanks in advance for any response.
>
> Matheus

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-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
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