Advanced Portfolio Report

Scott Armitage account+gnucash at scott.armitage.name
Tue Feb 11 07:51:25 EST 2014


On Tue, Feb 11, 2014 at 1:25 AM, Mike Alexander <mta at umich.edu> wrote:
>
> This transaction leaves 2.48 of the dividend unspent and held in the Cash
> account.  I gather that this is an account that can only be used to round up
> future dividend transactions to an integral number of shares.  Is this
> correct?  The problem is that this money will look like new money invested
> in the stock when it is used in a future dividend transaction, but that's
> not really correct.  The problem is even worse if you put the entire
> dividend into the Cash account and then use some of it to reinvest in a
> separate transaction.  Then the entire dividend looks like money in.  I
> guess the solution would be to somehow recognize this Cash account as
> special, assuming I'm understanding how it is used, and not count money
> coming from it as money in to the stock account.
>
> Does any of this make sense?  Is it anything worth worrying about? Things
> are handled differently in the US so I have no direct experience with this.
> For us, the entire dividend is always reinvested and generally buys a
> fractional share of stock.  This means there isn't any account like the Cash
> account mentioned in this sample transaction.

I do believe you have captured the scenario that Richard is driving
at. I think it is important to note (and Richard please correct me if
I am wrong) that the "Cash" account here is actually referring to the
"Cash" or "Money market fund" of whatever brokerage account holds the
relevant investment. With that in mind, the user /probably/ has this
set up as a parent account or as a separate account within the
brokerage parent account. For example, my investment account tree is
something like:

Portfolio
  Brokerage1
    Stock1
    Stock2
  Brokerage2
    Stock3

Buys/Sells from stocks 1 and 2 are all handled through the Brokerage1
account and those from Stock3 are all handled through the Brokerage2
account, including any unspent cash left over from transactions. With
this setup, one could filter on accounts that only hold securities as
sub-accounts. However, this makes it dependent on the user's account
hierarchy. What's really lacking here is an account type that is part
of your investment portfolio but is neither a stock nor a mutual fund.


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