If you take cash from your left pocket, hold it in your hand, and put it
back in your left pocket, did you have cash flow? It's cash flow neutral.
And no, unless you paid commission, buying the shares of company C didn't
cost you anything. You changed a pile of cash into a pile of stock
certificates worth, on that day, the exact same thing. You got neither
richer nor poorer.

"Israel Hsu" <israelhsu[at]hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:c3492661.0409081650.5d5cc952[at]posting.google.com...
- quote -

In microsoft.public.money, Israel Hsu wrote:

- quote -

What you would normally do is to enter Buy transactions for the two
stocks. Then you would enter Sell transactions for the same stock
dated later. Your income and capital gains reports should show the
difference between the buys and the sells.


- quote -

Yes.

I recently decided to be brave and start tracking all my investment
transactions in Money 2004.

I entered stocks that I was holding for company A and B (I
approximated the cost basis), and then entered some Sell transactions
for these 2 stocks. On the same date, I entered a Buy transaction for
company C's stock. The monies from transactions are tranfered to/from
a Money Cash account that corresponds to an account with my stock
broker.

Two issues:

1. To my surprise, my cash flow reports now include "Capital Gain"
income for selling the stocks of companies A and B, in the amount of
the entire sell transaction! If I sold $1000.00 worth of stock,
shouldn't capital gain be $1000.00 minus the cost basis of those
shares?

2. Even worse, the Buy transaction of company C stock doesn't show up
anywhere on the monthly report or the cash flow report! So my stock
trade of selling A and B stock to buy C stock didn't cost me a thing!

I'm obviously missing something obvious here... Can you help?

Thanks in advance!

--
Israel