Where can you find dividends for Australian Stock Market Shares (ASX) for more than 2 years of data?
It's difficult to compile free information because the large providers are not yet permitted to provide bulk data downloads by their sources.  As better advertising revenue arrangements that mimic youtube become more prevalent, this will assuredly change, based upon the trend. The data is available at money.msn.com.  Here's an example for ASX:TSE.  You can compare that to shares outstanding here. They've been improving the site incrementally over time and have recently added extensive non-US data.  Non-US listings weren't available until about 5 years ago. I haven't used their screener for some years because I've built my own custom tools, but I will tell you that with a little PHP knowledge, you can build a custom screener with just a few pages of code; besides, it wouldn't surprise me if their screener has increased in power.  It may have the filter you seek already conveniently prepared. Based upon the trend, one day bulk data downloads will be available much like how they are for US equities on finviz.com.  To do your part to hasten that wonderful day, I recommend turning off your adblocker on money.msn and clicking on a worthy advertisement.  With enough revenue, a data provider may finally be seduced into entering into better arrangements.  I'd much rather prefer downloading in bulk unadulterated than maintain a custom screener. money.msn has been my go to site for mult-year financials for more than a decade.  They even provide limited 10-year data which also has been expanded slowly over the years. Yahoo provides dividend data from their Historical Prices section, and selecting Dividends Only, along with the dates you wish to return data for. Here is an example of BHP's dividends dating back to 1998. Further, you can download directly to *.csv format if you wish: http://real-chart.finance.yahoo.com/table.csv?s=BHP.AX&a=00&b=29&c=1988&d=06&e=6&f=2015&g=v&ignore=.csv You can register with an online broker. You can usually join most online brokers for free and only have to fund your account if you decide to place a trade. You may also check out the website of the actual companies you are interested in. They will provide current and historic data of the company's financials. For BHP you can click on the link at the bottom of this webpage to get a PDF file of past dividends from 1984.
"I don't agree that the market as a whole is a ponzi scheme, but there are some ponzi-like aspects to it. If you buy high quality stocks like Coca Cola, Johnson and Johnson, AT&amp;T, Verizon, Kraft, Wells Fargo (the vanilla bank, not one of the crazy ones), IBM, Berkshire Hathaway etc and simply hold onto them for the next 10-20 years, you will make money. Even over the last decade, when stocks ""went nowhere"", you still came out ahead through the dividend payments. It was just at an unsatisfactory rate of return. Also ""the market"" consists of a lot more than just stocks. Corporate bonds are a big market and I always recommend people to look at bonds. If you cannot judge whether a company is credit worthy, how can you invest in the common stock? I've made a lot more money myself in the bond market than in the stock market.  However, for many stocks, they do look a lot like ponzi schemes. This is true, in particular, with many of the tech stocks (Cuban was a tech investor, so that is probably where his sentiment is coming from). You have many of these companies that create great products. However, they never have positive cash flow because all the money is spent to develop new products. As the share price goes up, the company issues new shares to fund research, stock options to employees to enrich them, etc. However, eventually, they run into a string of bad research that do not yield a new product and the share price plunges. Perhaps the company goes bankrupt. So you have a company that developed great products, but the shareholders never got a penny in dividends and the final shareholders have paper worth zero.  Take a look at Research in Motion for example. Creating the Blackberry has to be one of the biggest successes in tech over the last decade. However, has the shareholders gotten any richer? Only if they traded amongst themselves, nobody got a dividend. What happened to the many billions of dollars they made during the peak popularity years of Blackberry? It went to executives, employees, and was squandered on development that did not effectively defend the phone's dominant market position. Now the stock price is back down to the pre-prime years, and if a shareholder held onto it throughout the entire period, he would not have received a single penny. And this is a profitable enterprise, things look even more bizarre when you start looking at the tech companies that have NEVER had a positive earnings quarter and no plans to ever have positive earnings (something like Pandora comes to mind). Often, management at these more bizarre companies run the company as a toy - to play with their own ideas and to issue themselves stock as compensation. And of course, they sell a lot of the stock to cash in before they delve into the next risky venture. They have no intention of ever enriching anybody who holds into the stock in the long run. If for some reason they make money, they will put it all into their next toy project until one of them fails and wipes everything out.  If you invest in a profitable business with reasonable management, you will generally come out ahead. Some businesses get displaced by unpredictable circumstances and they go bankrupt. But on average, if a company is good at doing something and they pay out the earnings, you come out ahead. You get in trouble when businesses are good at something, and they take all the money they make and put it into doing something they are not good at. A business might only provide good cashflow for 10-20 years when the product is popular and before competitors cut into margins. If that money is squandered, the long term shareholder may ultimately have very terrible results. The long term shareholder ends up being the guy who keeps going all-in on a 80%-chance-to-win bet (that is what management is doing when they bet the company on the next unproven product), but eventually he gets zeroed out on one loss.  This is why if you look at Buffett's investments, they are all in simple businesses that spits off cash to the owner/shareholder. Businesses like soft drinks, snacks, rail roads, vanilla banking, utility-like energy companies, insurance, etc. You might be good at judging the odds of whether a business will succeed or not (aka make more money than your original investment or not). But you don't want management of that company to make a wildly different bet for you. Just because they are great at operating a company doesn't mean they are good enough at judging odds or disciplined enough to make those bets for you. I may have predicted accurately that Business X will be a great success, but if manage takes those profits and goes all in on Business Y, without giving me a chance to cash out, that may have disasterous results." looking over some historical data I cannot really a find a case where a stock went from $0.0005 to $1 it almost seem that once a stock crosses a minimum threshold the stock never goes back up. Is there any truth to that? That would be a 2000X (200,000%) increase in the per-share value which would be extraordinary.  When looking at stock returns you have to look at percentage returns, not dollar returns.  A gain of $1 would be minuscule for Berkshire-Hathaway stock but would be astronomical for this stock,. If the company is making money shouldn't the stock go up? Not necessarily.  The price of a stock is a measure of expected future performance, not necessarily past performance.  If the earnings had been more that the market expected, then the price might go up, but if the market sees it as an anomaly that won't continue then there may not be enough buyers to move the stock up. looking at it long term would it hurt me in anyway to buy ~100,000 shares which right now would run be about $24 (including to fee) and sit on it? If you can afford to lose all $24 then no, it won't hurt.  But I wouldn't expect that $24 to turn into anything higher than about $100.  At best it might be an interesting learning experience. The answer would depend on the equities held. Some can weather inflation better than others (such as companies that have solid dividend growth) and even outpace inflation. Some industries are also safer against inflation than others, such as consumer staples and utilities since people usually have to purchase these regardless of how much $ they have. In looking over the data comparing S&P 500 returns, dividends, and inflation, the results are all over the map. In the 50's the total return was 19.3% with inflation at 2.2%. Then in the 70's returns were 5.8% with inflation at 7.4 percent, leading one to think that inflation diminished returns. But then in the 80's inflation was 5.1%, yet the return on the S&P was up to 17.3% Either way, aside from the 70's every other decade since 1950 has outpaced inflation (as long as you are including dividends; hence my first paragraph). S&P 500: Total and Inflation-Adjusted Historical Returns Also, the 7% average stock appreciation you mention is just that, an average. You are comparing a year-over-year number (7% inflation) with an aggregated one (stock performance over x number of years) and that is a misrepresentation and is not being weighted for the difference in what those numbers mean. Finally, there are thousands of things that have an effect on the stock market and stocks. Some are controllable and others are not. The idea that any one of them, such as inflation, has any sort of long-term, everlasting effect on prices that they cannot outmaneuver is improbable. This is where researching your stocks comes in...and if done prudently, who cares what the inflation rate is? Its hard to write much in those comment boxes, so I'll just make an answer, although its really not a formal answer. Regarding commissions, it costs me $5 per trade, so that's actually $10 per trade ($5 to buy, $5 to sell).  An ETF like TNA ($58 per share currently) fluctuates $1 or $2 per day.  IXC is $40 per share and fluctuates nearly 50 cents per day (a little less).  So to make any decent money per trade would mean a share size of 50 shares TNA which means I need $2900 in cash (TNA is not marginable). If it goes up $1 and I sell, that's $10 for the broker and $40 for me.  I would consider this to be the minimum share size for TNA.  For IXC, 100 shares would cost me $4000 / 2 = $2000 since IXC is marginable.  If IXC goes up 50 cents, that's $10 for the broker and $40 for me.  IXC also pays a decent dividend.  TNA does not.  You'll notice the amount of cash needed to capture these gains is roughly the same. (Actually, to capture daily moves in IXC, you'll need a bit more than $2000 because it doesn't vary quite a full 50 cents each day). At first, I thought you were describing range trading or stock channeling, but those systems require stop losses when the range or channel is broken.  You're now talking about holding forever until you get 1 or 2 points of profit.  Therefore, I wouldn't trade stocks at all.  Stocks could go to zero, ETFs will not.  It seems to me you're looking for a way to generate small, consistent returns and you're not seeking to strike it rich in one trade.  Therefore, buying something that pays a dividend would be a good idea if you plan to hold forever while waiting for your 1 or 2 points. In your system you're also going to have to define when to get back in the trade.  If you buy IXC now at $40 and it goes to $41 and you sell, do you wait for it to come back to $40?  What if it never does?  Are you happy with having only made one trade for $40 profit in your lifetime?  What if it goes up to $45 and then dips to $42, do you buy at $42?  If so, what stops you from eventually buying at the tippy top?  Or even worse, what stops you from feeling even more confident at the top and buying bigger lots?  If it gets to $49, surely it will cover that last buck to $50, right? /sarc What if you bought IXC at $40 and it went down.  Now what?  Do you take up gardening as a hobby while waiting for IXC to come back?  Do you buy more at lower prices and average down?  Do you find other stocks to trade?  If so, how long until you run out of money and you start getting margin calls?  Then you'll be forced to sell at the bottom when you should be buying more. All these systems seem easy, but when you actually get in there and try to use them, you'll find they're not so easy.  Anything that is obvious, won't work anymore.  And even when you find something that is obvious and bet that it stops working, you'll be wrong then too.  The thing is, if you think of it, many others just like you also think of it... therefore it can't work because everyone can't make money in stocks just like everyone at the poker table can't make money.  If you can make 1% or 2% per day on your money, that's actually quite good and not too many people can do that.  Or maybe its better to say, if you can make 2% per trade, and not take a 50% loss per 10 trades, you're doing quite well. If you make $40 per trade profit while working with $2-3k and you do that 50 times per year (50 trades is not a lot in a year), you've doubled your money for the year.  Who does that on a consistent basis?  To expect that kind of performance is just unrealistic.  It much easier to earn $2k with $100k than it is to double $2k in a year.  In stocks, money flows TO those who have it and FROM those who don't. You have to plan for all possibilities, form a system then stick to it, and not take on too much risk or expect big (unrealistic) rewards. Daytrading You make 4 roundtrips in 5 days, that broker labels you a pattern daytrader.  Once you're labeled, its for life at that brokerage.  If you switch to a new broker, the new broker doesn't know your dealings with the old broker, therefore you'll have to establish a new pattern with the new broker in order to be labeled.  If the SEC were to ask, the broker would have to say 'yes' or 'no' concering if you established a pattern of daytrading at that brokerage. Suppose you make the 4 roundtrips and then you make a 5th that triggers the call.  The broker will call you up and say you either need to deposit enough to bring your account to $25k or you need to never make another daytrade at that firm... ever!  That's the only warning you'll ever get.  If you're in violation again, they lock your account to closing positions until you send in funds to bring the balance up to $25k.  All you need to do is have the money hit your account, you can take it right back out again.  Once your account has $25k, you're allowed to trade again.... even if you remove $15k of it that same day.  If you trigger the call again, you have to send the $15k back in, then take it back out. Having the label is not all bad... they give you 4x margin.  So with $25k, you can buy $100k of marginable stock.  I don't know... that could be a bad thing too.  You could get a margin call at the end of the day for owning $100k of stock when you're only allowed to own $50k overnight.  I believe that's a fed call and its a pretty big deal. You're only counting one year.   Let's say 30 years of data, minutewise, for 2,000 stocks, and 50 characters per data line. That's 1.5TB of data.  Since the market has grown, that's an overestimate - 30 years ago there weren't 2,000 stocks in the NYSE - but it still gives us ballpark of roughly 1 TB.  Not an easy download. As I said in the comments, from the SMH article, you will get $3.30 per share you hold in Wotif. The bit about Wotif veing replaced in the S&P ASX200 index by another company has no impact on your shares in Wotif. It just means that the index (the amalgamation of 200 companies) will have one drop out (Wotif) and another replace it (Healthscope). Adjustments can be for splits as well as for dividends.  From Investopedia.com: Historical prices stored on some public websites, such as Yahoo!   Finance, also adjust the past prices of the stock downward by the   dividend amount. Thus, that could also be a possible factor in looking at the old prices. I did a historical analysis a few years back of all well-known candlestick patterns against my database of 5 years worth of 1-minute resolution data of all FTSE100 shares.  There wasn't a single pattern that showed even a 1% gain with 60% reliability.  Unfortunately I don't have spread data other than for a handful of days where I recorded live prices rather than minutely summaries, but my suspicion is that most of the time you wouldn't even earn back the spread on such a trade.