total of all dividend payments for a particular company
No - there are additional factors involved. Note that the shares on issue of a company can change for various reasons (such as conversion/redemption of convertible securities, vesting of restricted employee shares, conversion of employee options, employee stock purchase programs, share placements, buybacks, mergers, rights issues etc.) so it is always worthwhile checking SEC announcements for the company if you want an exact figure.  There may also be multiple classes of shares and preferred securities that have different levels of dividends present. For PFG, they filed a 10Q on 22 April 2015 and noted they had 294,385,885 shares outstanding of their common stock.  They also noted for the three months ended March 31 2014 that dividends were paid to both common stockholders and preferred stockholders and that there were Series A preferred stock (3 million) and Series B preferred stock (10 million), plus a statement: In February 2015, our Board of Directors authorized a share repurchase program of up to $150.0 million of our outstanding common stock. Shares repurchased under these programs are accounted for as treasury stock, carried at cost and reflected as a reduction to stockholders’ equity. Therefore the exact amount of dividend paid out will not be known until the next quarterly report which will state the exact amount of dividend paid out to common and preferred shareholders for the quarter.
You need to look at the numbers when you're ready to transact.  What your crossover is worth now, what the truck will lease for then, what financing deals may or may not be available will all change. I'm not sure why you've already decided you will lease the truck, perhaps you're planning to take advantage of some kind of business write off.  I would personally never put anything down on a lease, though I have argued with people on here about that particular decision.  The reality is you need to look at the numbers.  Some banks will adjust the interest you pay on your lease to account for your down payment, some don't.   Consider a $9,000 lease, $250 per month for 36 months.  Consider you pay $1,000 up front as a down payment.   Example 1: $1,000 lowers the amount due on the lease to $8,000 lowering your monthly payment to $222.22 from $250, the downpayment has accomplished nothing.  Over the 36 months you will have still paid the same $9,000.   Example 2: $1,000 up front changes the amount owed and other fees generally applicable to a lease (gap insurance etc) and your payment drops to $215, your total over the lease is now $8,740 ($1,000 down and $7,740 in payments).   You need to look at the numbers.  In general if you know you will be purchasing the truck at the end of the lease it's more financially advantageous to just purchase it from the start. Because interest is tax deductible. I don't know much about the Chevron deal, but I'm an EM debt analyst and typically the issue you have is that dividends are taxed but interest is not. So to move money from a subsidiary instead of putting in equity and getting dividends (tax inefficient), instead you give debt and get interest back. You get a little less flexibility on payment but you more than make up for that (on average) with tax efficiency.   Don't think of it as a loan at all. Think of it as a pseudo-equity investment with required dividends.  Revenue is not taxed, profit is. Interest comes out of profit, dividends however are issued after profit.  This could all be wrong vis-a-vis Chevron. This is just how most of the companies I look at work. The most significant capability that an investor must have is the knowledge on the way to look for the high dividend stocks. Through accumulating good information relating to towards the stocks that you are finding is the better way of getting the perfect and profitable investments. It is really important to learn what makes a particular stock better and superior compared to other.   Traders are essential to start a complete analysis and investigation before getting their money on any business projects. Obviously, investors certainly want to have an investment that could guarantee an effective expense for a very reasonable cost the moment of getting it. The chances of crucial to invest in a market that you might be aware and qualified about. So, creating a comparison and compare in one business to a different is totally essential so as to find the high dividend stock. A security is a class of financial instrument you can trade on the market.  A share of stock is a kind of security, for example, as is a bond. In the case of your mortgage, what happens: You take out a loan for $180k.  The loan has two components. a.  The payment stream (meaning the principal and the interest) from the loan b.  The servicing of the loan, meaning the company who is responsible for accepting payments, giving the resulting income to whomever owns it. Many originating banks, such as my initial lender, do neither of these things - they sell the payment stream to a large bank or consortium (often Fannie Mae) and they also sell the servicing of the loan to another company. The payment stream is the primary value here (the servicing is worth essentially a tip off the top).  The originating bank lends $180k of their own money.  Then they have something that is worth some amount - say $450k total value, $15k per year for 30 years - and they sell it for however much they can get for it.  The actual value of $15k/year for 30 years is somewhere in between - less than $450k more than $180k - since there is risk involved, and the present value is far less.  The originating bank has the benefit of selling that they can then originate more mortgages (and make money off the fees) plus they can reduce their risk exposure. Then a security is created by the bigger bank, where they take a bunch of mortgages of different risk levels and group them together to make something with a very predictable risk quotient.  Very similar to insurance, really, except the other way around.  One mortage will either default or not at some % chance, but it's a one off thing - any good statistician will tell you that you don't do statistics on n=1.  One hundred mortgages, each with some risk level, will very consistently return a particular amount, within a certain error, and thus you have something that people are willing to pay money on the market for. "Thanks for the response.   I am using WRDS database and we are currently filtering through various variables like operating income, free cash flow etc.  Main issue right now is that the database seems to only go up to 2015...is there a similar database that has 2016 info?  filtering out the ""recent equity issuance or M&amp;A activity exceeding 10% of total assets"" is another story, namely, how can I identify M&amp;A activity? I suppose we can filter it with algorithm stating if company's equity suddenly jumps 10% or more, it get's flagged" Check out the NASDAQ and NYSE websites(the exchange in which the stock is listed) for detailed information. Most of the websites which collate dividend payments generally have cash payments history only e.g. Dividata. And because a company has given stock dividends in the past doesn't guarantee such in the future, I believe you already know that. Don't ever quantify a stock's preference/performance just based on the dividend it is paying out Volatility defined by movements in the the stock's price, affected by factors embedded in the stock e.g. the corporation, the business it is in, the economy, the management etc etc. Apple wasn't paying dividends but people were still buying into it. Same with Amazon, Berkshire, Google. These companies create value by investing their earnings back into their company and this is reflected in their share prices. Their earnings create more value in this way for the stockholders. The holding structures of these companies also help them in their motives. Supposedly $100 invested in either stocks. For keeping things easy, you invested at the same time in both, single annual dividend and prices more or less remain constant. Company A: $5/share at 20% annual dividend yield.  Dividend = $20 Company B: $10/share at 20% annual dividend yield  Dividend = $20 You receive the same dividend in both cases. Volatility willn't affect you unless you are trading, or the stock market tanks, or some very bad news comes out of either company or on the economy. Volatility in the long term averages out, except in specific outlier cases e.g. Lehman bankruptcy and the financial crash which are rare but do happen. In general case the %price movements in both stocks would more or less follow the markets (not exactly though) except when relevant news for either corporations come out. "(Value of shares+Dividends received)/(Initial investment) would be the typical formula though this is more of a percentage where 1 would indicate that you broke even, assuming no inflation to be factored. No, you don't have to estimate the share price based on revenues as I would question how well did anyone estimate what kind of revenues Facebook, Apple, or Google have had and will have. To estimate the value of shares, I'd likely consider what does my investment strategy use as metrics: Is it discounted cash flow, is it based on earnings, is it something else? There are many ways to determine what a stock ""should be worth"" that depending on what you want to believe there are more than a few ways one could go."