Buying stocks in different currency

Jose Gómez adler at dreamcoder.org
Fri May 19 20:15:41 EDT 2017


Hi,

My Gnucash file is in EUR. I am using a European broker, which shows my
amounts in EUR, but I have bought some stocks in USD. I have trading
accounts enabled (though I am not sure what that means), and I have also
added in the price editor a USD-EUR conversion.

Following the documentation and questions previously posted, I have created
a parent account in USD (MyBroker USD) to operate with the Stocks in USD.

    Investments
        MyBroker (EUR)
            MyBroker cash (EUR)
            MyBroker USD
                Stock 1 (USD)
                Stock 2 (USD)

With the above structure, everything works fine. I can buy stocks and the
buy prices appear with the $ symbol in the stock accounts. In the list of
accounts I can see on the stock entries the amount of that stock that I
own, and on their parent (MyBroker USD), the current USD value of all these
stocks. Also, in the root MyBroker (EUR) I can see the total amount in EUR
of all the stocks plus spare EUR cash.

The only downside of this structure is that for each operation I need to do
a transfer from MyBroker cash (EUR) to MyBroker USD, and then a second one
from MyBroker USD to the particular stock.

Can this be avoided somehow? I would prefer being able to transfer directly
from my MyBroker cash (EUR) account to the USD stock. But if I do that, the
EUR-USD conversion doesn't happen. The amount in USD that I buy is taken
from the EUR account, without converting from USD to EUR (i.e. I buy 100
USD in stocks, and in the balance account I get subtracted 100 EUR).

Regards,
Jose.


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