Retrieving Fund Capital Gains

[CGB]

Retrieving mutual fund (or ETF) historical prices and dividends through the Yahoo Historical server does not retrieve any capital gains distributions.

It appears that Yahoo Adjusted Historical also does not include capital gains distributions.

Are there any historical servers that work with Fund Manager to retrieve capital gains distributions? This is necessary to compare the performance of prospective Funds.

Vanguard has a button to download distribution data for their funds at the investor's site.

Eg, https://advisors.vanguard.com/investmen ... ral-shares

Perhaps you could add an option to download Vanguard's historical data for their funds, since they are widely used?

Thank you.

Clarke

[Mark]

Hi Clarke,

I'm not aware of another server that offers CG distribution data. Thanks for the idea on Vanguard. It would also be possible to import that data using "File / Import / Transactions / Generic...". The downloaded data would need to be massaged a bit before importing. Notice in the CNUM field you can specify a dist/share, so for investments you don't own and want to record distributions, this would work. From the online help:

* = For all of the DIST_* TRAN values, BNUM and CNUM are not required, but can be used to specify distributions per share when no shares will be owned. Normally, you record distributions in terms of values. When there are no shares owned though, you may wish to record a 0 value distribution, and enter a distribution per share. To supply a distribution per share figure, enter 1.0 for BNUM and the distribution per share amount in CNUM. This can be useful when importing data for investments you do not own, but wish to include the effects of distributions in performance metrics. If you own shares on the distribution date, any supplied CNUM distribution per share amount is ignored, and the distribution per share is always auto-calculated from the distribution value and shares owned. For related background on this issue, see the Distribution Per Share Prompt Dialog.

[CGB]

Thank you. Probably a little complicated for me to use -- still trying to figure out FM.
I guess FM uses BNUM and CNUM when importing dividends when no shares are owned, since they seem to show up on the graph?

[Mark]

Hi CGB,

Yes, it can be useful to record dividends, even when you don't own any shares.

[Houstonwb]

I have this problem too. Total Return in a benchmark is pretty important.