[GNC] Automatic capital gains question

[David Carlson]

Jon,

There is a big 'Gotcha' in the calculation of capital gains and losses
consisting mainly of the transaction fees.  IIRC, the lot feature does not
work correctly if you  do not embed those costs into the cost basis, but
your brokerage confirmations usually list the fees separately, so you need
to be aware of that when you enter your data into GnuCash.  I am old school
so I track gains in a spreadsheet and manually link lots, so I have not
tried using lots lately to see if that has changed in the last few years.
If you live in the U.S., your brokerage statements list the correct values
according to U.S. law and whatever agreement you have with your broker
regarding lot selection, FIFO by default, or other.

On Mon, Oct 7, 2024 at 6:26 AM Jon Schewe <jpschewe at mtu.net> wrote:

> I've been tracking my investments in GnuCash for some time, however
> haven't been using the capital gains features to track gains and
> losses. I recently spent time reading the sections of the manual about
> what accounts to create for gains and losses and how to use the lots
> feature to scrub an account to determine gains and loses across
> multiple transactions. I've now tried it on one of my investment
> accounts where I purchased shares over multiple transactions and then
> eventually sold all shares over some amount of time. So the balance in
> the account is currently zero. I tried using the automatic gains
> feature and am left with a question about the value of the gains. In my
> mind the gains/loses should be equivalent to me adding up how much I
> paid for all shares and subtracting from that how much I sold all
> shares for and that tells me my gains. I compared that with what shows
> up in my capital gains account after the scrub and they don't match. Is
> this expected and I'm not understanding something about how GnuCash
> computes capital gains?
>
> Jon
>
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-- 
David Carlson