accounting for managed investment accounts

[gnucash.133518b at telus.net]

No help from the GnuCash community? If creating a GnuCash account for a 
managed investment account is not actually possible, then perhaps 
someone can recommend alternative accounting software that can?

Carl

On 2014-04-28 12:33 AM, gnucash.133518b at telus.net wrote:
> Imagine I have a real-world personalized professionally-managed
> investment account of the sort often referred to in Canada as a "managed
> account" or "discretionary account". I am not consulted on the buying
> and selling of the assets and cash within the account. As this is not a
> mutual fund, my external transactions with this account are in dollars,
> not shares. Similarly, my tax consequences relate to external
> transactions with this account, not transactions that are internal to
> the account.
>
> I want to add a corresponding investment account created in my GnuCash
> book, but how do I do this? I don't think I can use either of the
> "stock" or "mutual fund" account types because those appear to be
> strictly denominated in share units. The number of different assets in
> the managed account are too many and too often changing for me to want
> to try tracking them individually in GnuCash and the whole point of such
> an account is to manage it as a (more or less) black box.
>
> After reading Peter Selinger's well-known "Tutorial on multiple currency
> accounting" as well as "8.7 Selling Shares" in the GnuCash Tutorial and
> Concepts Guide I have a very tenuous understanding that realized
> gains/losses need to be accounted for with investment accounts. It is
> not clear to me from my reading why it is that when tracking individual
> stocks that one must always manually calculate and enter profits for
> individual stock sale transactions such that they are sourced by an
> Income:Capital Gains account but that this does not also apply to
> currency exchange transactions. Assuming someone can tell me how I can
> even implement my managed account in GnuCash, how do I account for its
> realized gains?
>
> For unrelated reasons I will have trading accounts enabled. How does
> this changes things, if at all?
>
> I also have a variety of loose investment assets within a real-world
> portfolio account I manage on my own. I am not yet sure that I want to
> track those individually as stocks in GnuCash either, but I at least
> need to account for them as a group, so I think this would be pretty
> much the same thing as the managed account. It seems to me this would be
> an approach that a lot of people would go for if someone could give us
> an easy-to-understand description of how to accomplish this sort of
> thing correctly.
>
> In case it wasn't already painfully obvious, keep in mind that I am
> totally new to GnuCash and accounting concepts in general.
>
> Carl