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by anonu 1071 days ago
* "index" has particular connotation in finance. This is just a list - not an index.

* Why "monthly"? There may be higher quality companies that pay quarterly. Why exclude them?

* Have you looked at the myriad dividend ETFs? Things like SDY showcase funds that have regularly raised dividends YoY. ETFs may be a better way to get consistent yield and yield growth. Look into SDY, DVY or higher-powered div rates with SDIV, SRET.

* Lots of people noting tax treatment of divs as well as pointing out the "dividend irrelevance theory". Tax treatment will vary depending on the type of income. If you're looking purely at equity dividends then they will most probably be treated as income. However, with ETFs you may be exemptions depending on the income source. For example US Treasury ETFs that pay dividends are exempt from US State taxes (look at Bondbloxx suite of treasury ETFs). Municipal bond ETFs are exempt from both state and federal tax in most cases.

* Dividend irrelevance: If a $100 stock pays $1 div then its stock price is adjusted to $99. So there's no free lunch. The point is you want cash-flow generating businesses where management has decided they don't really know what to do with extra cash laying around so they hand it back to their shareholders. Being able to consistently generate these dividends and GROW the dividends indicates typically high quality, value stocks. The short-term end of the yield curve is yielding 5.4% (https://www.ustreasuryyieldcurve.com/) right now... so a company would -- very broadly speaking -- need to engage in projects with hurdle rates greater than what they could get in very safe bets with the US Government.

* Other forms of yield harvesting or income generation are writing OTM calls. A consistent strategy can be found in ETFs like JEPI or XYLE

* Re: monetizing your site. The web is awash with finance websites. This data can be found in a screener tool (finviz.com amongst many). People want trading ideas, so maybe this is better served as a newsletter or similar. Also, why should I trust your site. Financial data is notoriously finicky. Old data gets re-stated. What are your data sources?

2 comments

You make some good points here.

1. I stated index in this post (whoops); luckily I called it a list on the website.

2. Partly, in seeking an income strategy, that seemed important to me. Also, frankly, it allowed me to limit the scope of my dataset a bit. Maybe I should go back to the drawing board and include quarterly stocks as well, though.

3. I'll look into it

I'll jump ahead and answer your last question as it's relevant to the others: I'm using Polygon.io's API to pull financial data. I too have noticed that the data can be unreliable, repeats, and has many records missing certain data. I've sanitized that data on my backend, checking for and removing duplicates, as well as only displaying historical records with adequate data. Beyond that, I'm not sure how to improve the quality.

4. What about dividend reinvesting? Can't you avoid taxes if you do that?

5. Is that also true with leveraged funds? It seems like many of these high yield dividend stocks are in that category.

6. Interesting, I'll look into that.

Hope I responded to all of these points adequately. I appreciate the thoughtful and intelligent answer. I'm still not sure (and need to do more research) on whether such a dividend strategy is useless. It seems like reinvesting could provide good returns as a strategy--when the stock dips, so long as the payout is constant, you simply get more income. Maybe I'm missing something, though.

Re 4: reinvested dividends are still taxable income.

The way companies get around this (return value to shareholders without triggering a taxable event) is by repurchasing and retiring shares.

For example, there are 100 public shares trading at $1/share. At the end of the quarter, the company has a spare $1. If they issue a dividend, every shareholder gets $0.01, which is taxed.

Instead of issuing a dividend, they repurchase 1 share for $1. Assuming the value of the company hasn't changed, the per-share price should now be $1.01. Basically, they gave you an untaxed $0.01 increase in equity value, which you can choose to recognize on your own schedule.

This might give you another idea, which is to list companies with stock repurchase programs.

Also, re 3: make sure you account for the expense ratio of these funds. Since dividends are relatively volatile (lots of new entrants and exits on the margin), you might be surprised by how much these ETFs charge for their service. Sometimes, it's justifiable as a price worth paying. Other times it isn't, use your judgement and VOO as a benchmark of what bare-minimum expenses look like.

As an example, USOI's expense ratio is 0.85% and VOO's is 0.05%. Over long holding periods, a 17x higher expense ratio is extremely meaningful.

> Instead of issuing a dividend, they repurchase 1 share for $1. Assuming the value of the company hasn't changed, the per-share price should now be $1.01. Basically, they gave you an untaxed $0.01 increase in equity value, which you can choose to recognize on your own schedule.

Small nitpick here - buybacks are taxed as of this year in the US. There is a 1% excise tax paid on stock buybacks (paid by the company, not the stockholder).

Thanks for the reply -- good info in here.

I'll consider adding a section / filter for stocks with repurchase programs. That is an interesting point I didn't consider. It's a bit tangential to theme of this site, but maybe I can make it work.

Factoring in the expense ratio is a very good idea--I'll look into how to add that.

Buybacks are slowly replacing dividends, and the crossover point happened awhile ago, like decades ago:

https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2018/08/19/taking-stock-shar...

Building a list of companies that pay dividends, while excluding buybacks, is like saying "I'm building a list of music that's available on vinyl" while excluding CDs, iTunes, and streaming.

Yes it's a thing you can do, and yes it'll be interesting to some section of the population, but if the underlying goal is overall music (investing / money / income / whatever), then it looks really, really weird.

Valuable feedback here; I appreciate the link. This is a strong case for adding buybacks. I'll look into how I might go about this.
> 4. What about dividend reinvesting? Can't you avoid taxes if you do that?

No. Dividends that are reinvested are still taxable.

Wrong. You claim that AAPL goes from $100 to $99 when it distributes $1. The only way that mean anything is if you also claim that the next year, AAPL hands out $1 and drops to $98.

Clearly that is not how the stock price has developed over the years. Dividend paying stocks don't decline in price. They increase in price, just like any other stock. And some decline, like any other.

No, you're wrong. OP said that on the instant that $1 dividend is paid, the stock price goes from $100 to $99. The extrapolation that next year the stock price will go from $99 to $98 is _your_ extrapolation, and wrong. The moment after the the dividend is paid the stock's price might go up, might go down. So on next dividend's payment it might go from 50 to 49 or from 200 to 199. The conclusion that this implies that that stock payment dividends always go down is also _your_ conclusion and also wrong.

> Wrong

You're not smart enough to be this arrogant.

Dividend paying stock has no limitations on growth compared to non div-paying stock. However when (cash) div-paying stock goes ex div, the stock price drops with that amount.

(Even reporters sometimes forget about that and try to find reasons what news caused a stock to drop instantly.)

What is the mechanicism that drops the price? Does the market automatically adjust the ask price? Or do buyers instantly start offering a lower price at that moment?
Market makers drop the bid/ask by the ex-dividend amount immediately after it is announced, or arbitrageurs short the stock when the ex-dividend amount is announced and then they cover their short once the ‘overvalued’ stock they sold is back at fair value.
In the US, the price adjustment is done by the stock exchange itself; the price on open is adjusted exactly by the dividend amount. It's not some collective emergent behavior of the market. (I don't know what non-US exchanges do.)
> Dividend paying stocks don't decline in price.

They decrease in price by the amount of the dividend when the dividend is paid out (it’s actually when it goes ex-dividend, the payout may not happen for a few weeks). It’s extremely simple to understand.

The valuation of the company includes all cash, assets, debt, etc. If AAPL pays out a $1 per share dividend on 15.73B shares, they have $15.73B less cash. The valuation of the company drops by $1/share the instant after the dividend, and so does the share price.

The price action of AAPL after the dividend has been priced in has no relation to the dividend itself.

> Wrong. You claim that AAPL goes from $100 to $99 when it distributes $1. The only way that mean anything is if you also claim that the next year, AAPL hands out $1 and drops to $98.

A stock falling in value by the ex-dividend amount happens every single time a dividend is paid out.