investment lots

[Chris Good]

Hi all,

 

GnuCash 2.6.7 Windows 10

 

I see from [1]: 

Gains are always calculated using FIFO cost basis

 

This agrees with what I see in the Advanced Portfolio Report after a sale -
cost basis and realized/unrealized gain were calculated using the costs of
the oldest stock acquisitions.

 

A friend partially sold some stock and elected to sell those lots with the
highest cost, not the oldest.

 

This seems to mean if one partially sells an investment without selling the
oldest first, the Adv Port Rpt (cost basis and gains figures) are now wrong
for the residual stock going forward.

 

Is there some way to do a transaction or some lot magic that would allow me
to adjust the cost of the sold stock to be from the lots actually sold?

 

I tried adding a dummy stock account transaction to decrease cost of
remaining stock:

 Shares 0, Price 0, Sell = Cost Adjustment

but this made Adv Port Rpt incorrectly overstate the Realized Gain by the
value of the Cost Adjustment

(and what should the other side of the double entry be?).

 

I have heard about GnuCash 'lots' being used to keep track of which stock
lots are unsold.

I searched the GnuCash xml data file for stock lots but couldn't find any (I
searched for the figures I would expect to find).

 

When I go Actions, View Lots from the Stock account, there is nothing in the
'Lots in this Account' or 

 'Splits in lot' panes, and just info from the stock transactions splits in
the 'Splits free' pane.

Nothing to indicate how much of a particular 'lot' is unsold.

The signs of the (cost) values in the 'Splits free' pane do not seem to be
what I would expect:

the opening balance cost value is +ve, DRP's are -ve, and a sale is +ve.

 

Am I perhaps going into the View Lots screen incorrectly?

 

Are the stock lots perhaps only calculated by the report and not persisted
to the saved xml file?

 

I know the report has 'Basis calculation method' options Average, FIFO or
LIFO but none of these match the correct cost.

 

If anyone can shed some light on this I'd really appreciate it.

 

[1]
https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2010-February/033668.html

 

Regards,

Chris Good

 

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