cannot Retrieve historical dividends

[Mark]

Hi Houstonwb,

You can't do what you're describing when you own some shares. You can't go from a download of distribution/share into shares and price automatically. When importing reinvestments (REINV_*) with the generic import, you need:

Shares reinvested
Price paid
Commission (usually $0)

If you download a list of data in the format of:

Distribution/share

You have to convert that on a per-distribution basis, before you can format it for importing. For example, if you own 100 shares, and receive a $1/share dividend that you want to reinvest at a price of $10/share, your reinvestment will be for:

10 shares
$10 price

and you'll end up with 110 shares, so if you get another distribution/share of $1/share next quarter, your dividend will be $110 this time, instead of $100. If the price was still $10, you would have a reinvestment of:

11 shares
$10 price

and now you have 121 share, so and and so on...

The generic transaction import needs you to tell it 10 shares at a price of $10/share was reinvested, and then 11 shares at a price of $10/share was reinvested. It cannot take as an input that you received a $10/share distribution, and please figure out what the shares would be. You have to do that, before importing.

However, if you choose to not own shares in your benchmark, then you can import the original distribution/share data as described in the documentation. For an example of this scenario, you could import:

3/31/21,VFIAX,DIST_D,0.0,1.0,100.0
6/30/21,VFIAX,DIST_D,0.0,1.0,100.0

and use a format string of:

MM/DD/YY,SYMB,TRAN,ANUM,BNUM,CNUM

[Houstonwb]

I am surprised because FMgr is able to convert per share dividends downloaded from the quote servers to total dividend shares distributed based on share balances in FMgr in other situations.
I dream that it would be an easy option to add to the Import routine because it is already written for Internet Retrieve>Historical Prices from quote servers like Yahoo.

I have been a user for a long time and only this week realized why my Benchmarks were a little off. This affects comparative performance, and Modern Portfolio Theory calculations like Alpha, Beta, Correlation and R-Squared. This is particularly a problem when looking at funds with high capital gains payouts like Vanguard Total Stock Mkt Idx (VTSMX) in 2017.

[Mark]

Yes, the logic is not complicated, and is already available for retrieving from Yahoo (Historical), it just isn't a feature in the generic transaction import. It is something we can look at adding. I believe it would work best as a new transaction type for the generic import.