Missing 401(k) dividends
Your investment is probably in a Collective Investment Trust. These are not mutual funds, and are not publicly traded. I.e. they are private to plan participants in your company. Because of this, they are not required* to distribute dividends like mutual funds. Instead, they will reinvest dividends automatically, increasing the value of the fund, rather than number of shares, as with dividend reinvestment. Sine you mention the S&P 500 fund you have tracks closely to the S&P Index, keep in mind there's two indexes you could be looking at: Without any new contributions, your fund should closely track the Total Return version for periods 3 months or longer, minus the expense ratio. If you are adding contributions to the fund, you can't just look at the start and end balances. The comparison is trickier and you'll need to use the Internal Rate of Return (look into the XIRR function in Excel/Google Sheets). *MFs are not strictly required to pay dividends, but are strongly tax-incentivized to do so, and essentially all do.
"You have a Solo 401(k). You can fund it with cash, or I believe, with shares of your own company. You can't pull in other assets such as the ISOs from another employer. I see why that's desirable, but it's not allowed.  You wrote ""this will mitigate all tax complications with employee stock options.""  But - you can't transfer the ISOs from your job into your Solo 401(k). As littleadv notes, it's self dealing. Once the ISO is exercised there's no hiding the gain into that 401(k)." "401(k) doesn't have a ""return rate"", because 401(k) is not a type of investment -- it is a vehicle for investment, with certain tax treatments. Just like your money that's not in a 401(k), you can invest it in either the bank, a CD, stocks, mutual funds, bonds, etc., you can similarly (depending on the options given to you by your 401(k) plan) invest the money in the 401(k) in a cash account, buy stocks, mutual funds, etc. Your return is dependent on how you invest your money, not whether it's in a 401(k) or not. Whether it's in a (Roth or Traditional) 401(k) simply affects when and how it gets taxed. (It is true that most 401(k) plans offer little variety in types of investments you can choose; however, this is not a big deal, as chances are that in a few years, you will leave your company, at which point you are able to rollover the 401(k) into an IRA, at which point you will have many, many options for how to invest it.) To make a valid comparison, you should be comparing the same type of investment in both cases. That means, you should assume the same return for both the money outside the 401(k), and the money inside the 401(k), and only consider the taxes and penalties (if you plan to withdraw early)." Rolling a 401(k) to an IRA should be your default best option. Rolling a 401(k) to another 401(k) is rarely the best option, but that does happen.  I've done it once when I started a job at a company that had a great 401(k) with a good selection of low-cost mutual funds. I rolled the 401(k) from one previous job in to this 401(k) to take advantage of it.  In all other cases, I rolled 401(k)s from previous jobs to my Rollover IRA, which gave me the most freedom of investment options. Finally, with 401(k)-to-Roth IRA rollovers, it's important to decouple two concepts so you can analyze it as a sum of two transactions: All the answers that show the equivalency of 401(k) pre-tax and Roth 401(k) post-tax using equivalent contributions are correct assuming equivalent tax rates upon withdrawal. There is some potential gain if your tax rate upon retirement is higher than your working tax rate, but often people calculate a smaller percentage of their working income for their retirement income, which may offset a higher tax-rate anyway. In my mind, the primary advantage of a Roth 401(k) is that it effectively allows you to contribute more for retirement if you are currently maxing out your contributions in a regular 401(k) and IRA and want to contribute more. Doing so can be a big advantage when you are young and can benefit from those additional dollars being put into your retirement account early. This is effectively what is illustrated by the Fidelity calculation, and is something to consider if you are of the mind to aggressively save early for retirement. The reason Roth allows you to contribute more is because traditional IRA contributions are capped. Suppose the cap is $5500. Suppose also you immediately rollover your traditional IRA to a Roth IRA. This is a post-tax contribution, and growth on that is tax-free. If you maxed out your employer pre-tax 401(k) to $17500 and maxed out your IRA, you have maxed out your retirement contributions to $23000. Suppose two doublings, then the 401(k) has grown to $70000, and the IRA has grown to $22000. However, the withdrawal from the 401(k) is taxed, so assuming 25%, the total is $74500 after tax. Now, suppose instead you maxed out your employer Roth 401(k) post-tax instead, so you have put in $17500 post tax. And now, also max out your IRA. Now, all of your $23000 grows tax-free. So upon two doublings, you walk away with $92000. This is because you maxed out your contribution post-tax, meaning it was as if you were allowed to contribute $23333 to your pre-tax 401(k). So if you intend to max out your retirement account contributions, and are looking to contribute even more to retirement accounts, one way is two change over to contributing into the employer Roth 401(k). There are two parts in this 1042-S form. The income/dividends go into the Canada T5 form. There will be credit if 1042-S has held money already, so use T2209 to report too. Well, if the short seller has to pay the dividend out of their pocket, what happens to the dividend the company paid out ??  Sounds like there are 2 divdends floating around, the short's, and the company's, but only 1 share of stock. Principal has probably distributed your money to a company that holds dormant retirement plan account balances. I work for a third-party administrator and we usually use a company called Penchecks. They receive dormant accounts and try to locate the people they belong to. They don't do this for free though, so the sooner you find your account the better. Principal would have to keep a record of where they sent your money, although I don't know for how long they are required to keep that record. For example, doctors are only required to keep records for 7 years. The PBGC will help you find your lost balance. They are a gov't agency that protects retirement plan participants. They have a search engine for this kind of thing: http://search.pbgc.gov/mp/ Also https://www.unclaimedretirementbenefits.com/ is a registry of unclaimed retirement plan benefits. "Random question: are there any companies with ""physical,"" ""real,"" or ""in-kind"" dividends?   For clarification, suppose a winery offers a security with a dividend of X bottles of wine deliverable annually for every Y amount of shares owned.   Does such a company or practice exist?"