Looking for Best Practices for Tracking Stock Investments

[Pierre Constantineau]

Hi all,

I am currently setting up GNUCash to track my investments (Mutual
Funds and Stocks) and I am wondering what would be the best way to set
it up.  I have a number of questions related to all this...

1 - It is possible to track portfolio or commodity performance?
Including interest, dividends and capital gains?

2 - Accounts
>From the tutorial, there is an indication that things are quite
flexible in how things are setup.  Is there a best way to set it up to
allow for easiest tracking of what contributed the best return?

3 - Files
Is it better to have the investments as a separate file than the main
banking and checking file that track every single household
transaction?

4 - Transactions
Stock purchase and sale transactions have extra complexity over mutual
funds because of commissions.  I have figured out how to split the
transaction to include them and have it show up in the reports.
However, for dividends, how do I code the transaction to tie it to the
stock?  In the tutorial, there is the following indication :
"If you want to track dividends on a per-stock basis, you would need
to create an Income:Dividends:STOCKSYMBOL account for each stock you
own that pays dividends." Are the reports "clever" enough to pick on
these links?  How would it show it?

5 - Reports (1)
Considering that the expenses, income and actual holdings are split in
between accounts, do the investment reports track dividend and
interest income that are tied to their commodity.  Mutual funds may be
OK since they are typically re-invested.  However, when cash payments
are done (dividends), do the reports take into consideration the
dividends at all?

6 - Reports (2)
What would be the way to setup my accounts and reports to be able to
show how the return of each stock has evolved over time?

7 - Reports (3)
It looks like the pie-chart reports could be handy to create a
"Portfolio allocation" report.  Is there a better way to setup the
accounts such that the "Bonds", "Equity", "Intl Equity" are different
slices of the pie.   - I guess I might have answered my own question
on that one...  Placeholder accounts for the above might work...

8 - Reports (4)
There has been mention of a Portfolio Performance report being
developed.  Any progress on this?

Thanks for the input.

Note: For some obscure reason, this email didn't go through the list
server the first time around.  Anyway, here it is again...

Pierre Constantineau
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Running somewhere to get nowhere.
Just for the fun of it!
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