I suspect that the purpose of the trading accounts was to account for the loss/gain in currency conversion (only). Not sure if applying the trading accounts for other commodities makes sense. These should be accounted for through Capital Gains/Losses accounts. I find that mixing other commodities trades in trading accounts almost destroys their usefulness. Limiting their implementation to Currency commodities only would make more sense. What do others think?
I think you need to bring this up in gnucash-devel to reach a wider audience.
Some ancient references. All the Selinger's texts I've seen so far refer to currencies. I'm not sure if it was ever meant for other commodities, especially stocks, to be included in this conversion. https://www.mscs.dal.ca/~selinger/accounting/gnucash.html https://www.mathstat.dal.ca/~selinger/accounting/tutorial.html
https://www.mathstat.dal.ca/~selinger/accounting/tutorial.html#5 is an example from real estate.
Correct. There, from what I see, he doesn't use trading accounts but explicitly books capital gains/losses onto appropriate accounts.
Trading accounts are meant to account for unrealized gains. Capital gain transactions are used to record realized gains. It doesn't matter whether the commodities involved are all currencies or not. I believe that if you read the page John mentioned in comment 3 you will see that's what is being done.
