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

[John Ralls]

On Apr 25, 2012, at 2:13 AM, Fredrik Persson wrote:

> 
> 
> 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.

Lots isn't hard to use, but it might not work well in this case. It also doesn't know how to do average cost, only FIFO.  It's the only facility in Gnucash that would make your computations more automatic, though. 

Regards,
John Ralls