Dividend stocks

How the money actually reaches you

A profitable company can do four things with its cash: reinvest it, buy back its own shares, pay down debt, or hand it to shareholders. The fourth is a dividend. The board declares an amount per share, sets a schedule of dates, and the money lands in your brokerage account without you doing anything. That is what makes it one of the few genuinely passive income streams — no tenants, no invoices, no maintenance.

Four dates govern every payment. On the declaration date the board announces the amount. On the ex-dividend date the shares start trading without the right to the upcoming payment — buy on or after it and the seller keeps the money. The record date is when the company checks its share register, and the pay date is when the cash actually moves, usually two to four weeks later.

The ex-dividend date is the one that matters in practice. On that morning the share price typically opens lower by roughly the dividend amount, because the company is about to be worth that much less in cash. Collecting a dividend moves value from the share price into your cash balance — it does not create value out of nothing.

The headline number on every table here is the dividend yield — but there are two of them, in separate columns, and they are not the same measurement. We compute both from the payments stored in this database rather than taking a vendor's field, so every yield on the site can be traced back to a list of individual payments on the security's own page. The second number to read is the payout ratio, which is the share of earnings the dividend consumes — the closest thing to a coverage check that a single ratio can give you.

Where a dividend fits against the alternatives

Dividend income sits between two neighbours. Below it, cash and Treasuries pay a contractually fixed amount with no principal risk if held to maturity — see cash rates and bonds for what those currently pay. Above it, preferred stocks pay a fixed rate that ranks ahead of the common dividend but almost never grows, and options income converts price movement into premium at the cost of capping the upside.

What common dividends offer that none of those do is growth. A fixed coupon is worth less every year inflation runs; a payment that rises with the business is not. What they give up is certainty — the coupon is an obligation, the dividend is a decision the board can reverse at its next meeting. That is the entire trade, and it is worth being explicit about it before comparing a 4% dividend yield with a 4% bond yield as though they were the same number. They are not the same number, and this site does not print them under the same heading: a forward dividend yield is an estimate of a discretionary payment, a bond's yield to maturity is a contractual return to a fixed date, a Treasury bill's discount rate is quoted on a different basis again, and a credit index effective yield is an average across hundreds of bonds. Each page labels which one it is showing.

Related structures are covered elsewhere on the site because their income works differently even though it arrives the same way: REITs distribute rent under a tax requirement, BDCs pass through the interest on private loans, and dividend ETFs bundle the whole decision into one holding.

Sources for every figure on this page

Where each number on this page comes from. Price, market capitalisation and the security's name, sector and industry: Financial Modeling Prep, quote and company-screener endpoints, stored daily by pipeline/quotes.py and weekly by pipeline/universe.py. Individual dividend payments — amount, ex-date, record date, pay date and whether the payment was regular or special: Financial Modeling Prep, dividends endpoint, stored by pipeline/dividends_fmp.py. Payout ratio: Financial Modeling Prep, ratios-ttm endpoint, stored by pipeline/fundamentals.py and measured against GAAP earnings per share. Everything else — the forward yield estimate, the trailing twelve-month yield, the payment cadence, the count of rising years and the first year of history it could be counted from, the five-year growth rate, the next ex-date and the research score — is computed on this server by pipeline/compute.py from those stored payments and prices. No vendor's own yield field is printed anywhere in this section, which is why every figure here can be traced back to a list of individual payments on the security's own page.

Definitions of every derived column, including the exact formula behind the research score, are on the methodology page.