Trading Accounts for Securities

[Keith Bellairs]

I started looking at using trading accounts but I may be missing something.

The trading account created by gnucash for a stock shows as a balance the
number of shares in the account. This is also the balance shown in the
asset account for that stock.

Transactions for all stocks post to the USD (in my case) trading account.
So the USD trading account seems to show the aggregate of purchases, sales,
gains. losses etc. of all the stocks - sort of like the amount of money I
have on the table for trading. But I would rather see the realized gains in
an income account. And I can see the total unrealized gain(loss) in an
advanced portfolio report.

I had guessed that unrealized gains would somehow be reflected in the
trading account when the value of the underlying security is updated. In
that way the trading account would look like the marginable value of my
stocks. Then I looked at the documentation. The examples only show realized
gains being posted. So again, the actual asset account for a security
provides me more info. I guess I could manually post unrealized gain to the
trading account each time I look up the price of a security, since the
Trading Account - USD does not have to match the real amount of cash on
hand.

In the end I do not see that I get anything from using trading accounts. I
can see that they would be useful for currency if I had to track the
exchange rate on every foreign currency transaction. But the IRS lets me
use an average rate for my CDN income(expense).

Am I using trading accounts wrong?

Keith