u/lolokajan

Im just in the process of returning to tracking my investments with hledger. Ive asked all the llms this question and would like to get a human opinion.

Do you prefer that each position is a sub account of the Investment account? Or that each position is just a commodity in the account. Both strategies are found on the net. I see that a tool like hledger-lots shows example transactions as:

2023-01-05 Buy AAPL
    Asset:Stocks                                  5 AAPL @ 160 USD
    Asset:Bank

I kind of like the simplicity of that and i have started testing both:

2026-03-03 Trade SELL Cameco Corp.  ; symbol:CCO
    Assets:WS:Margin                   -10 CCO @@ $1708.50
    Assets:WS:Margin:Cash              $1708.50

and

2026-03-03 Trade SELL Cameco Corp.  ; symbol:CCO
    Assets:WS:Margin:CCO              -10 CCO @@ $1708.50
    Assets:WS:Margin:Cash              $1708.50

Even though I kind of prefer not having the mess of all the subaccounts, I have a feeling that the former format may be less adaptable and useful for reports. At one point Gemini told me I was a power user and keeping my journal clean by using tags, and then later when i could not get hledger -B to show me the book value of my opening positions it told me you dummy, its because you don't have a sub account for the positions... But maybe there are workarounds and tags are awesome....

But since i am at the setup stage and have prepared 18months of transactions, once i pull the trigger and start tweaking the transactions etc it will be somewhat of a challenge to switch methods. Any thoughts you humans?