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

[Fredrik Persson]

On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 4:13 PM, John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:

>
> On Apr 23, 2012, at 6:47 AM, Eric Morey wrote:
>
> > On Mon, 2012-04-23 at 15:07 +0200, Fredrik Persson wrote:
> >> Can you explain what you mean when you say "gnucash will do calculations
> >> for you in numeric fields"?
> >
> > I'm sure he means that gnucash will, for example, fill the field with 10
> > if you type 2*5 into the field, thus relieving you of having to do the
> > calculation yourself (possibly with the aid of a separate calculator)
> > and entering the result, 10, into the field.
> >
>
> Yup,, that's what I meant.
>
> Regards,
> John Ralls


Well, that brings me back to square one... I'm not sure my question has
been understood.

Example;

Day 1: I buy 10 shares @ $10
Day 2: I sell 5 shares @ $15
Day 3: I buy 15 shares @ $25
Day 4: I sell 9 shares @ $9

When entering the "sell" transactions, I need to manually calculate how
much money I've gained. The sell on Day 2 I've gained 5 * (15 - 10) = $25.
That's easy, but I have to do it by hand. The sell on day 4 it becomes
complicated. I have 5 shares left that I paid $10/share for, so that's $50.
Then I have 15 shares that I paid $25/share for, so that's $375. In total,
I have 20 shares that I paid $425 for, which means 425/20 = $21.25 per
share. So the loss on the sell on day 4 is 9 * (21.25 - 9) = $110.25.

THAT I need to calculate by hand every time I sell. And if I have a lot of
transactions on this particular share it adds up to a lot, LOT of work. All
the numbers are there, so gnucash should somehow be able to help me with
this.

How? That's the question. Lots seems to be a mechanism that *could* be used
here, but from what I read about it, it's not very easy or straightforward.

/Fredrik