Selling part of a position

It's common to buy a tube of ten Eagles and later sell only two or three of them. Gold Silver Ledger handles that cleanly: every coin or bar from the original purchase is already its own inventory record, so you tick the specific units you sold and leave the rest where they are.

The original buy transaction stays in your history exactly as it was, the unsold items keep tracking live spot, and the sold ones move to SOLD with their cost basis and holding period intact.

This article covers the partial-sale flow specifically — when only some of the items from a single buy leave your possession.

For the broader sale walkthrough, see How to record a sale. For why the form makes you pick item-by-item in the first place, see Selecting which specific items you sold.

You bought N of the same product in a single transaction. You're selling fewer than N of them today. The remaining items stay in your inventory.

The mechanics are the same as any other sale — tick the items you sold in Step 1, fill in Step 2, submit — but a few specifics are worth knowing about how the form treats the half you're keeping.

Even though you bought ten Eagles on one transaction, they show up as ten separate rows on the Record Sale form. Each row is one physical piece, with its own checkbox, and they're all listed together (same product, same purchase date, same dealer).

On the screen, ten Eagles from a single buy look like ten near-identical rows in the inventory table.

That's by design. The form is asking you the same question for every piece — "did this one leave your possession?" — and you answer it one tick at a time. If you sold three, you tick three boxes. If you sold seven, you tick seven boxes. The unticked rows stay HELD.

When all the items came from the same buy transaction, no — picking row 1, 2, 3 versus rows 8, 9, 10 produces an identical result. Items from the same purchase share:

So their cost basis and tax treatment are identical down to the cent. The form still asks you to pick specific units because that's how the inventory model works under the hood, but the choice between two units from the same buy is cosmetic, not financial.

This is not the case when you have multiple buys of the same product at different times. Those items have different cost bases and different holding periods, and which one you tick matters.

That scenario is covered at length in Selecting which specific items you sold.

The Record Sale form creates a new sell transaction; it does not edit the buy transaction. So when you sell three of ten Eagles:

If you expand the original buy transaction on the History page after a partial sale, you'll still see all ten items listed there. The three that sold are flagged as SOLD; the seven that remain are flagged as HELD. The transaction itself isn't carved up.

For the items you didn't tick, nothing changes. They:

In other words: a partial sale only touches the items you ticked. The rest of your inventory carries on as if the sale never happened.

You bought 10 American Gold Eagles in February 2025 for $4,810 each — total $48,100, plus $25 shipping allocated across the order, so $2.50 of shipping per coin. Each coin's cost basis is $4,812.50.

Today, May 2026, you sell three of them at $4,750 each.

The original February 2025 buy transaction is still in your History page, unchanged. The Eagles you sold are linked to the new May 2026 sell transaction. Everything ties together cleanly.

Shipping is allocated at purchase time, not at sale time. When you recorded the buy, the $25 shipping was spread proportionally across the line items, and each individual coin took on its share — $2.50 each in the example above. That allocated shipping is part of the cost basis of every coin individually.

The practical implication: when you sell a few coins, each sold coin carries its share of the original shipping with it into the realized-gain math. The unsold coins also keep their share. The shipping doesn't have to be re-allocated or re-split. It was baked into each item's cost basis at the moment of purchase.

For the longer version, see Adding shipping and handling costs.

The partial-sale flow scales naturally to selling the same position in pieces over time. If next year you sell three more of the original ten Eagles, the form works the same way: open Record Sale, find the remaining seven Eagles in the list, tick three of them, fill in Step 2, submit.

The new sale is its own transaction with its own date and proceeds; the four still-unsold Eagles continue to track live spot.

There's no concept of "closing out the position" until every item from the buy has been ticked SOLD. Inventory just diminishes as you go. The History page ends up with one buy transaction and multiple sell transactions, all linked to specific items from the original tube.