Chapter 8 - investment accounts

[Jamestk]

*Cheers for the reply John.*

It works better to make the Brokerage asset account of type Assets rather
than Stock, because 
one will usually have a cash/money market account of type Bank inside of a
brokerage account and making the enclosing account of type Stock precludes
that. Although you didn't ask about it, you generally want to mark the
container account as a placeholder to prevent accidentally entering splits
at the upper level. 

*Yes, that makes sense which  I have noted*

The brokerage expense account isn't strictly necessary if you net
commissions into purchase and sale amounts. That's how US tax authorities
want it done, but it might be different in other countries. 

I don't use the Advanced Portfolio Report (Reports>Assets &
Liabilities>Advanced Portfolio Report), but I think it might use a mirror of
the brokerage hierarchy under income for tracking dividends and interest in
order to compute total return. I just have some dividend accounts
(long-term, short-term, and tax-exempt to reflect US tax law) set up per
brokerage. 

*My objective which is moving a little closer, is to generate a report which
shows my current open positions with each broker (only two). Because I tend
to invest long term it's easy to forget amounts, profit/loss and who holds
the stock (nominee) on your behalf - ideal format would be

Broker - ABC

Purchase date

Stcok - IBM

Number of shares

I am close to these using the 'transactions report' but not quite there yet.
The other way would be to have an IBM stock account for each broker account
as a child or sub account. Would this approach cause duplicates in reporting
at all?*

I've also never tried to import stock trade transactions, but IIRC others
have said here that the importers aren't quite clever enough to handle them. 

Yes, by all means enter stock transactions first from the cash account from
which the payment will come or to which the proceeds will go. Note that if
you use the completion feature the price will be copied as well and you'll
have to correct it in the stock account. For sales, you then switch to  the
stock account and enter the gain or loss as a cash amount with the shares
column blank and balance it to the appropriate income account, again with
the shares column blank. Take care not to use <Enter> until you have
finished entering those two splits. Detailed instructions are in 
http://gnucash.org/docs/v2.4/C/gnucash-guide/invest-sell1.html

*Entering the price manually is not a problem although the screen shots look
a little daunting for one transaction. In essence you have to enter the
profit and loss manually then post it across to the correct brokerage
account. This is fine, but I am guess the closed (sold) positions will
appear in the report too?*

I have tried the Lots mechanism and found it problematic, so I enter the
gains splits by hand as above. It has hooks for sale allocation other than
FIFO, but no-one has ever implemented any of them. It also puts the G/L
splits in a separate transaction and uses a hard-coded top-level account --
"Orphan Gains USD" (or GBP in your case) -- which means all of the gains
splits have to be moved to the right account after "scrubbing".
Unfortunately, moving them confuses it for subsequent scrubs if you've got
more than one sale in a single lot. 

*I have sorted the 'orphaned' trades by deleting the transaction instead  of
changing the figures. Not ideal, but quicker for corrections*




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