What is the "moneydance-way" of recording in a ledger when buying and selling foreign stocks? i read the 2015 user's guide and several other forums and I am even more confused. One forum say use the "foreign amount" field, but the User's guide says the foreign amount field is not visible in an investment account. Another forum says define a category in the foreign currency. I tried that and the results are confusing so it seems I don't understand the rule set that MD is using.

Here's my situation. I have two accounts - one in US $ (Base) and another in Canadian $; both are investment accounts because they both contain stocks and mutual funds. In the US account, I wanted to xfer money out (by selling a US stock) and move the cash into the Canadian account to purchase a Canadian stock.

In my first attempts, when I transferred, MD recorded the transaction (Xfer) btw the two accounts, but used a different exchange rate that what I was charged.

Reading the user's guide and the forums, I tried the concept of creating a category. So I created a "Canadian stocks" category and set the currency to Canadian dollars. Then in my US $ investment acct I create a transaction to transfer cash from the account to the category, I recorded a negative $ value. Then in the Canadian account I created a transfer transaction from the Canadian stocks category into the Canadian account, and I entered the actual value based on my actual exchange rate.

So the two accounts look okay because I used the (Canadian stocks) category as an intermediary. However, when I view the category, the deposit transaction used a different exchange rate that the actual), so the withdrawal was a different amount, leaving the category with a non-zero balance. This is obviously not the desired state.

So what am I doing wrong? It seems I don't understand the theory of operations within MoneyDance.

Thanks,
Hunt