[GNC] How do I add stock trades?

[D.]

Hello, 

You have a number of misconceptions going here, beginning with the purpose and implementation of Trading Accounts. If you go to the external article on trading accounts referred to in the wiki, you should get a clearer picture. I am no expert on trading accounts, so I'll let others clear the air on that topic further. 

However, you would be best advised to go back to the chapter on investments in the Tutorial & Concepts Guide, which is the official documentation for GnuCash. There you will see, for example, that your ABC account should be set up as a Stock or Mutual Fund type account, denominated in ABC commodity (which you will have to add in the security editor), and not in AUD. That account will indicate then how many shares of ABC you own. The price db will be used to determine the value of those shares in your book currency.

When you sell those shares, you will need to account for the gain or loss, which can be manually calculated and entered, or be done automatically using the lots scrub feature. 

All of this is covered, as I said, in the Tutorial. Have a read of that, and try again. 

HTH,
David


-------- Original Message --------
From: armanschwarz <armanschwarz at gmail.com>
Sent: Sat May 02 12:12:15 GMT+05:30 2020
To: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
Subject: [GNC] How do I add stock trades?

I would like to start recording my stock trades in GnuCash (3.10). Based on
the instructions I could find
(https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Trading_Accounts) I enabled "Trading"
accounts and then created a top-level Trading account with the name
"Trading".

I tried to fumble through the instructions by creating a sub account with a
stock type "ABC". Then I clicked on "Transfer" and selected "Trading" as my
"From" Account (I had deposited $10,000 into it from my Equity account), and
"ABC" as my "To" account. For "Amount" I picked $10,000 and for "To Amount"
I selected 20,000, at which point GnuCash correctly calculated "1 ABC =
0.50000 AUD" (Australian dollars is my currency).

At this point my accounts look like this:

- Trading ($10,000)
  - ASX (-$10,000)
    - ABC (20,000- ABC)
  - CURRENCY ($10,000)
    - AUD ($10,000)
  ABC (20,000 ABC)

I can't really tell whether this is right or not. In any case I now tried to
sell the stocks, say at $0.6 to simulate a 20% profit. So I hit "Transfer
funds" again and type $12,000 as the amount and select "Trading:ABC" as my
"From" account. However, now Gnucash incorrectly says "Currency AUD
(Australian Dollar)" for the "From" account, when the currency is actually
ABC stock. There's no option for me to select the number of stock or, if
"Amount" is already supposed to represent the number of stock (I can't tell)
then I have no option to select the price I achieved per stock on the sale.

The other thing I tried was sending a negative amount of money from
"Trading" to "Trading:ABC" to simulate the sale, so I typed "-12000" into
the amount column and -20000 in the "To Amount" column, which results in the
message "1 ABC = 0.60000 AUD" which seems right.

However, now my whole account appears to be in a somewhat buggy state; the
"Trading" account says $10,000 next to it when viewed from the main accounts
window, but when I enter the account, I can see 3 transactions ($10k
transfer from equity, $10k transfer to ABC and $12k transfer back in from
ABC from the sale) with a final balance of $12,000, which doesn't match up
with what I see in the main account. Also, if I click on any of the
transactions I get a popup saying "The current transaction is not balance."
with two options; "Balance it manually" and "Let GnuCash add an adjusting
split". Chosing either option or pressing cancel have no effect, and I can't
click anything else in the window without that popup coming back unless I
close the account or delete the transaction.

I can't inspect any transaction other than the first transfer from Equity as
the popup prevents me from looking at any other splits. However, if I click
on View -> Transaction Journal I can see that all f the transactions seem to
balance, with an equal number of "Increase" and "decrease" amounts for AUD
as well as for ABC.

I also tried this tutorial:
https://www.gnucash.org/docs/v3/C/gnucash-guide/invest-buy-stock1.html

However, the instructions on that wiki page don't match with what I see in
GnuCash (e.g. they have screenshots of "Shares", "Price", "Buy" and "Sell"
columns - I only have "Decrease" and "Increase"), so I wasn't really sure
how to make that work.

Any ideas on how I can use this feature?



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