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

[David Carlson]

On 4/26/2012 5:11 AM, Fredrik Persson wrote:
> 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
>

You are correct, FIFO is an acronym for First-In First-Out.  LIFO is an
acronym for Last-In First Out.  These terms are sometimes used in other
contexts as well as in accounting.

David C
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