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

[Fredrik Persson]

On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 3:47 PM, John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:

>
> 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
>

Thank you John.

Ok, so to summarize; no, gnucash does not do this and for the moment I have
to continue to do this by hand or an external program.

I am not familiar with the abbreviation "FIFO" (at first I assumed you mean
First-In First-Out, a programmer term). LIFO, what is that? (I am not
american, so I've never run into these abbreviations.)

/Fredrik Persson