Trading Accounts for Securities

[Derek Atkins]

Hi,

Trading accounts do not show you UNREALIZED gains.  They exist to help you
balance out REALIZED gains once you have a sale transaction.

-derek

On Wed, February 21, 2018 12:00 pm, Keith Bellairs wrote:
> 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
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-- 
       Derek Atkins                 617-623-3745
       derek at ihtfp.com             www.ihtfp.com
       Computer and Internet Security Consultant