Sorry for the lack of posts this week. I have been busy working on a new tool to help dividend growth investors. The idea came to me last week and I have been trying to code the tool in my spare time. So what does this tool do?
Currently the Dividend Tool retrieves dividend data from Yahoo! Finance and shows you the history along with the percentage of dividend growth each year. It took me longer than I anticipated because I wanted to make the page dynamic so it doesn’t refresh the whole page each time you submit a stock symbol.
There are a few caveats for people looking at the tool.
- Yahoo! Finance data is not always accurate. So, you should check all numbers through an alternate resource.
- In order to correct for the inaccuracy of Yahoo! Finance, I take only one quarterly dividend each year and multiply by four. I found this gave better results because usually the problem with Yahoo! Finance is that they are missing one quarterly dividend. The big drawback here is if the company adjusts dividends during the year, then the dividend amount may not be exactly correct.
- I am only going back to 1980. I don’t know if this matters but I think 27 years worth of dividend data is enough.
My ultimate goal is to create a one-click investment analysis tool. I can manipulate just about any numbers that can be retrieved from Yahoo!. Future improvements may include:
- High and low yields from each year based on the stock price.
- Graphs of the data.
- Download of all data to an Excel spreadsheet.
I would really like suggestions on what you would like to see in this tool and I hope you find it useful. Have a great week and stay warm.
January 6th, 2008 at 9:33 pm
I have nothing useful to add, other than I like it.
Thanks!
January 7th, 2008 at 5:37 am
Great tool for quickly capturing dividend history. To be really useful, it would be great if it could be used as a screener to find stocks that have increased their dividend by more that x% for the past y years and that currently yield z% whose payout ratio is less tan 50% of current earnings etc etc. I found myself checking the dividend history of stocks I already own instead of finding stocks I really should own.
January 7th, 2008 at 5:56 pm
Very impressive! You are quite talented with html.
Best Wishes,
D4L
January 11th, 2008 at 9:15 am
[...] Dividend Investing Blog has posted an Excel tool to help download dividend data on stocks - very [...]
May 14th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
You deserve a medal for this!
May 14th, 2008 at 9:11 pm
Thanks, Rodney. Unfortunately I have been very busy with other projects, so I haven’t been able to expand the Tool yet. Hopefully sometime after the first part of June things will slow down for me.