Realized gains with trading accounts

[Neal Groothuis]

Yes; the demo files attached to that bug were quite illustrative.  Thanks!

On Mon, Jan 19, 2015 at 5:42 PM, Mike Alexander <mta at umich.edu> wrote:

> --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
>
>