Stocks, gains/losses, do I really have to calculate them by hand?

David Carlson carlson.dl at sbcglobal.net
Sun Apr 22 12:33:07 EDT 2012


On 4/22/2012 10:25 AM, John Ralls wrote:
> On Apr 22, 2012, at 7:30 AM, Fredrik Persson wrote:
>
>> Let's assume I have an account with Stock X, where I buy and sell
>> frequently. It can be difficult to know exactly what gain, or loss, a trade
>> has generated. According to the concepts guide, I need to calculate this by
>> hand:
>>
>> http://www.gnucash.org/docs/v2.4/C/gnucash-guide/invest-sell1.html#invest-sellexample2
>>
>> While this is trivial in the case described in in the link above, it's a
>> lot more difficult if you've bought and sold a number of times.
>>
>> Do I really have to do this calculation by hand? Or does gnucash have
>> support for automatically calculating gains and losses from the
>> transactions alone?
>>
>> Thanks in advance!
> There's the Lots mechanism [1], but it can handle only FIFO, makes a separate transaction for the gains, and the account that it puts the gains splits into is hard-coded with a weird name.  I've used it a few times and gone back to doing it by hand.
>
> Don't forget that gnucash will do calculations for you in numeric fields. There's no need to pull out a calculator.
>
> Regards,
> John Ralls
>
> [1] http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Concept_of_Lots
>
>
Fredrik,

Check the archives
https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user at the end of
March for a thread called Selling Stock for some discussion about how to
implement your transaction entries.  I personally had some difficulty
with getting GnuCash to complete them correctly until I practiced a lot.

David Carlson
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