Trading Accounts for Securities

[Keith Bellairs]

Thanks, Derek. I get that.

I guess trading accounts do not provide for a use case I need.

Keith


On Wed, Feb 21, 2018 at 12:10 PM, Derek Atkins <derek at ihtfp.com> wrote:

> 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
>
>