How to account for Capital Gains (Losses) in double-entry accounting?

External question — Personal Finance Stack Exchange Author: William Breathitt Gray Original post: https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/22258 License: CC BY-SA 3.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ Adaptation: HTML converted to plain text; contact email addresses removed. After taking an introductory financial accounting class, I decided to use GnuCash to keep track of my personal finances. I have 5 major accounts in my general ledger: Equity Currently only used to record opening balances for other accounts. Assets Subaccounts for Bank , Cash , etc. Liabilities Subaccounts for Credit Cards Income Sources of income, such as Salary and Gifts . Expenses Sources of expense, such as Groceries and Gas . This worked out well for the past year. However, I've recently had to record the capital losses I made on a short-term forex trade, but I can't remember how to record this. In particular, do I use two separate accounts as such: Income > Capital Gains Expenses > Capital Losses Or just one Capital Gains (Losses) account where a negative balance indicates a capital loss ? if just a single account, would this account be under Equity or Assets ?