Realized gains with trading accounts

[Neal Groothuis]

Hello all,

To address a topic that seems to pop up here with some frequency and yet
never get resolved to people's satisfaction: how do you account for
realized gains if you're using trading accounts?

First, a workaround that I'm starting to use that seems less clunky than
some others proposed here: create a "realized gains" equity account, and
use that to offset entries into your realized gains income account.

E.g., if you have an investment account with 4 FOO purchased at USD 250,
and you sell 2 of them at USD 500, the entry automatically created by
GnuCash will have four splits:
 -2 FOO from your FOO investment account,
 +2 FOO to your FOO trading account,
 +1000 USD to your USD cash account, and
 -1000 USD to your USD trading account.

To use my workaround for this, add two more splits:
 + 500 USD to your realized gains income account, and
 - 500 USD to your realized gains equity account

WIth this, I believe that your balance sheet will correctly show your
trading gains (realized + unrealized), your total equity, and your retained
earnings (only reflecting realized gains) properly.

Second, a question/proposal: it seems that Peter Selinger's tutorial on
multicurrency accounting (
http://www.mathstat.dal.ca/~selinger/accounting/tutorial.html) is generally
recognized here as the authoritative document on how GnuCash should use
trading accounts.  In section 5.1 (
http://www.mathstat.dal.ca/~selinger/accounting/tutorial.html#5.1), he
shows a transaction which moves CAD 5000 from the CAD trading account to a
CAD realized gains account.  As far as I can tell, this is impossible in
GnuCash and is the reason that people have to come up with workarounds to
handle realized gains.  Is my understanding correct?  If so, wouldn't this
be a bug?