Cool Feature on Yahoo Finance
Posted in Money, Technology by George
I guess this has been out for a while, but you can use Yahoo Finance to create a display on your own website that shows your visitors which stocks you own and how they are doing. You can see mine right here, with a few indices substituted for index funds I own that won’t show up on the display. Coolness!
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September 21st, 2006 at 10:40 am
DVY interests me. How can you evaluate its historical returns? Do you know of a website that shows a chart or gives total returns if someone re-invested the dividends.
For investing my fixed income portion of my asset portfolio inside a Roth IRA (so taxes on dividends vs taxes on interest aren’t an issue), I’d like to compare total historical returns of investing in the Vanguard GNMA fund with reinvesting the interest payouts vs DVY with reinvesting the dividend payments.
Do you know any website that would do that?
September 21st, 2006 at 11:27 am
I meant do you know anywhere on the web that someone took the stocks in DVY and went back in time and tried to give an estimated historical return for DVY since DVY doesn’t have much history.
I understand DVY has a lot more risk than a GNMA fund since the GNMA bonds are backed by the goverrment while the stocks in DVY have no backing. They really are almost two different species of investment when it comes to risk and the type of income that is generated but both are used to generate income and both are less risky than a lot of other types of investments.
September 21st, 2006 at 3:39 pm
Go to yahoo finance, and check historical prices for a stock. For dvy the URL is here: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?s=DVY . All of these prices are adjusted for dividends and splits. So all you would do is export these to a spreadsheet, then find the other investments you want to compare to, export those to a spreadsheet, make sure dates match up, and graph in your spreadsheet program. Or you could just divide the ending number by the beginning number and subtract one and multiply by 100 to get the percentage return.
I would caution you to not rely too heavily on historical returns to make your investment choices… past returns aren’t typically the best indicator of future results…
Hope this helped!
September 21st, 2006 at 4:53 pm
I am sorry I did not ask the question clearly.
DVY has been around for roughly 3 years. I am curious if you have seen anyone try to go back in time and tried to estimate what a index tracking the highest 100 dividend yielding securities in the Dow Jones U.S. Total Market would have returned for a longer period. There are many places I see the returns of DVY.
I am curious for a couple of reasons. I am wondering what kind of impact tax laws changes on dividends may positively/negative impact this etf. Currently taxes on qualified dividends are really low. I wonder if this had a big impact on this index since this may change when someone else comes into office.
I am curious get a rough estimate of the expected premium return of investing in this index of securities versus a fund of government backed mortgages over a longer period.
September 21st, 2006 at 7:44 pm
That would be trickier. I ran some searches for ticker symbols for dow jones select dividend index (the index that is mirrored by DVY) but none had historical data > 5 days. If you could find the index that it tracks you would be able to estimate what DVY would return, less operating expenses.
The really hard way would be to run a search for the 100 highest dividend yielding securities at any given year and go backwards… but that’s a lot of work and it might not mirror the way the dow jones dividend index works, depending on how it is rebalanced.
I’ve poked around at iShares (http://www.ishares.com/fund_info/detail.jhtml;jsessionid=MOYXKPTE3XPQCRJUMTCBBGSFGQ0EOD50?symbol=DVY) but haven’t found anything that seems like it would help you much. Maybe you’ll find something at that URL though…
October 25th, 2006 at 3:06 am
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