Realized gains with trading accounts

[Mike Alexander]

--On January 19, 2015 at 6:31:47 PM +0000 Neal Groothuis 
<neal at nealgroothuis.name> wrote:

> I didn't know about all of the balancing rules, nor the existence of
> the concept of a base currency for a transaction.  The resulting need
> to create splits that have value but no change in quantity to realize
> gains seems a bit perverse (which I believe is what Michael Tsang was
> getting at in his comments on the bug you referenced), but it does
> have the desired effect, so that's good enough for me.
>

Just to add a bit more to this discussion, the single trading account 
Peter Selinger uses in his examples is more or less equivalent to the 
sum of all trading accounts in GnuCash, converted to a common currency. 
If you run a balance sheet report, this is what will be shown for the 
"Trading Gains" entry.  Since any given account in GnuCash has to have 
a single commodity, there must be multiple trading accounts where he 
shows only one containing transactions of different currencies or other 
commodities.

If you look at the demo6 file I attached to bug 742795 
(<https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=742795#c12>) you'll see 
that the two realized gain transaction in that file have an effect on 
the this total much like the effect Peter Selinger describes in section 
5.1 of his tutorial.  Running a balance sheet report on that file for 
Jan 11, 12, 13, and 15 of 2015 will demonstrate what I mean.

           Mike