Seeking feedback and suggestions on handling stocks, stock options, and commissions

[Murry McEntire]

I use GnuCash for personal accounting, do some trading of stocks and
options, and am seeking better/easier ways of handling transactions related
to equities.

For my usage outside GnuCash, commissions and fees can be handled for U.S.
taxes as either expenses or direct adjustments of basis. I prefer the
second.

For the stock options, which have short lives and don't have useful current
price values so have little utility in being tied to the actual security
and lack online price quotes, I used Account Type:Stock, Security: template
(with no connected security), Smallest Fraction:1 (Options are always whole
numbers), and an appropriate Parent Account. This allowed me to track the
number of options bought and allow capital gain and other zero-share rows
in a transaction. I enter the price of the option (e.g., $81.00) rather
than the option price quote which is per share (e.g. $0.81) Note one option
is almost always for 100 shares.
I am curious if someone has come up with a better way of tracking options?

I first tried a separate Expenses:Commissions and Fees account. I found the
suggestion of separate accounts under Commssions and Fees for each equity
overly cumbersome and of little use so used one aggregate account. It was
enough to set up asset accounts for each, especially the options which can
get very numerous:
Asset:Investments:BrokerAccount:XXX Jan13 60.00 Call
Asset:Investments:BrokerAccount:XXX Jan13 61.00 Call
Asset:Investments:BrokerAccount:XXX Jan13 62.00 Call
Asset:Investments:BrokerAccount:XXX Feb10 60.00 Call
Asset:Investments:BrokerAccount:XXX Feb10 61.00 Call
.....
Asset:Investments:BrokerAccount:YYY Jan13 42.50 Call
.....
Expenses:Commisons and Fees:BrokerAccount

I found Commissions and Fees don't belong with my other expenses, since
they are an adjustment to basis, not an expense in a personal sense.
I thought of using another top tier Expenses2 account or an Equity account,
but then tried handling it as part of the stock accounts such as capital
gains are handled since this grouped all the basis information
conveniently. So I now have transactions like (Transaction Journal view,
squished overlapping columns):
                            Tot        Tot   Tot
Date   Num  Descrip. (Acct) Sha. (Pr)  Buy   Sell  Balance

2013-01-02  DES1 buy         5           5            5
       Buy            ACCT1  5    81  405.00
       Fee  Comm&Fees ACCT1             6.09
            Net cost  ACCT2                 411.09

2013-01-07  DESC1 sell       -5                 5     0
            Net       ACCT2           422.89
       Fee  Comm&Fees ACCT1             7.11
    Income  Profit    ACCT1            11.80
      Sell  Gross     ACCT1  -5   86        430.00
            Net gain  ACCT3                  11.80

Where DESC1 is "XXX Jan13 52.50 Call"
   ACCT1 is "Assets:Investments:Broker:XXXJan13_52.50Call"  of account type
Stock
   ACCT2 is "Assets:Investments:Broker:Cash"  of account type Bank
   ACCT3 is "Income:Capital Gains"    of account type Income

This seemed very useful for grouping relevant information for both viewing
and tax purposes. I did find Bug 605669 makes it a beast to enter the ACCT1
rows without shares and price values. It usually took three tries to get a
row to take, and every once in a while two tries. One such row per buy and
two such rows per sell really made it a pain in the a** to use this
approach; I'll be VERY glad when this bug is fixed. I set the Fee and
Income flags (Buy and Sell are automatic) but have not yet explored their
usefulness.

Anyone have better approaches, given my criteria of commissions and fees as
more  basis adjustment than expense?

One other topic on user friendliness. I find the Auto-Split Ledger view
best for most accounts but the Transaction Journal view highly preferable
for viewing the Stock account types because of the split transactions. I
find myself often wishing I could set a view type by account type or by
individual account that would persist across opening/closing/opening an
account or better yet across sessions, rather than just the system wide
default. Does anyone else think this would be very desirable, so worthy of
my submitting it as an enhancement request?

Murry