[GNC] unrealized gain / losses for mutual funds

[john]

> On May 15, 2022, at 8:15 AM, Andrea Borgia <andrea at borgia.bo.it> wrote:
> 
> Since the end goal is to derive unrealized P&L and then include those in the economic result for the year, I thought I could record a fake sale, after all at book opening the next year I do a fake purchase (with same price, just one day apart). If this makes sense, how do I compute the P&L given the new price? Must I do that manually with a split or is there some kind of assistance by GnuCash?

That's called marking to market and it's not directly supported by GnuCash. You'll have to manually "sell" your assets at the FMV on the last day of the old accounting period and buy them at that same FMV on the first day of the new period. You'll compute cap gains on the sale as usual but you'll maintain separate realized and unrealized cap gain income accounts. When you finally sell the asset for real you'll create a pair of splits that transfers all of the unrealized capital gains for those shares to the realized cap gains account. That won't be too hard as long as you buy and sell whole positions all at once--e.g. you bought 100 shares of AAPL and sold them all at once later without ever buying or selling in between. If that's not how you invest then you'll have to either invent a way of keeping track of each purchase lot or an average-cost model. For a discussion of the latter see https://bugs.gnucash.org/show_bug.cgi?id=797796 <https://bugs.gnucash.org/show_bug.cgi?id=797796>.

The Balance Sheet report automatically computes an Equity:Unrealized Gains line item if you use the "price nearest to report date" price source option. You can compute that as an income value by comparing it to the same line item for the previous period.

Regards,
John Ralls