Question about ex-dividend date timing
Here is the definition of Ex-dividend date from the SEC: Once the company sets the record date, the stock exchanges or the National Association of Securities Dealers, Inc. fix the ex-dividend date. The ex-dividend date is normally set for stocks two business days before the record date. If you purchase a stock on its ex-dividend date or after, you will not receive the next dividend payment. Instead, the seller gets the dividend. If you purchase before the ex-dividend date, you get the dividend. The linked document discusses weekend, and holidays involved in the calculation. The difference between the record date and the ex-dividend is to allow for the three days of settlement.
"The difficulty is that you are thinking of a day as a natural unit of time.  For some securities the inventory decisions are less than a minute, for others, it can be months.  You could ask a similar question of ""why would a dealer hold cash?"" They are profit maximizing firms and, subject to a chosen risk level, will accept deals that are sufficiently profitable.  Consider a stock that averages 1,000 shares per day, but for which there is an order for 10,000 shares.  At a sufficient discount, the dealer would be crazy not to carry the order.   You are also assuming all orders are idiosyncratic.  Dividend reinvestment plans (DRIP) trigger planned purchases on a fixed day, usually by averaging them over a period such as 10 days.  The dealer slowly accumulates a position leading up to the date whenever it appears a good discount is available and fills the DRIP orders out of their own account.  The dealer tries to be careful not to disturb the market leading up to the date and allows the volume request to shift prices upward and then fills them." "Mutual funds generally make distributions once a year in December with the exact date (and the estimated amount) usually being made public in late October or November. Generally, the estimated amounts can get updated as time goes on, but the date does not change. Some funds (money market, bond funds, GNMA funds etc) distribute dividends on the last business day of each month, and the amounts are rarely made available beforehand. Capital gains are usually distributed once a year as per the general statement above. Some funds (e.g. S&P 500 index funds) distribute dividends towards the end of each quarter or on the last business day of the quarter, and capital gains once a year as per the general statement above. Some funds make semi-annual distributions but not necessarily at six-month intervals. Vanguard's Health Care Fund has distributed dividends and capital gains in March and December for as long as I have held it. VDIGX claims to make semi-annual distributions but made distributions three times in 2014 (March, June, December) and has made/will make two distributions this year already (March is done, June is pending -- the fund has gone ex-dividend with  re-investment today and payment on 22nd). You can, as Chris Rea suggests, call the fund company directly, but in my experience, they are reluctant to divulge the date of the distribution (""The fund manager has not made the date public as yet"") let alone an estimated amount. Even getting a ""Yes, the fund intends to make a distribution later this month"" was difficult to get from my ""Personal Representative"" in early March, and he had to put me on hold to talk to someone at the fund before he was willing to say so." Google will be issuing Class C shares (under the ticker symbol GOOCV) to current GOOG holders in the beginning of April.  The Class C shares and Class A shares will then change symbols, with the Class C shares trading under GOOG.  This was announced on January 30th.   Details are in this benzinga article: Projected Trading Timeline March 27 - April 2 Record Date - Payment Date Class C shares commence trading on March 27 as GOOCV on a when issued basis Class A shares continue to trade as GOOG, with entitlement to Class C shares Class A shares will also trade on an ex-distribution basis, without entitlement to the Class C shares, as GOOAV April 3 EX Date The ticker for the Class A shares will change from GOOG to GOOGL The ticker for the Class C shares will change from GOOCV to GOOG and commence regular way trading The ticker for the Class A shares that traded on an ex-distribution basis - GOOAV - will be suspended It may be true for a bond fund.  But it is not true for bond etf.  Bond etf will drop by the same amount when it distribute dividend on ex-dividend date. "Total Return is the percent change in value (including andy dividends) of an instrument.  The ""trailing 12-month"" means that your starting point is the value 12 months ago.  So the formula is: where V is the value of the instrument on the reference date, V0 is the value of the instrument 12 months prior to the reference date, and D is the amount of dividends paid between the two dates." You only have to own it for a day (or rather for some amount of time before the close of trading the day before the ex-dividend date).  This is governed by exchange rules based on the date of record and payable date set by the company.  You might want to look at this article or this one for more details. It should be difficult to make money from changes due to the dividend distribution since it is well known and expected.  The exchanges have established rules for handling the various details that can come up, and traders account for the change where appropriate (as in option pricing).  Also, note that the favorable U.S. tax treatment of dividends requires a 60-day ownership period for the stock. "A bit strange but okay.  The way I would think about this is again that you need to determine for what purpose you're computing this, in much the same way you would if you were to build out the model. The IPO valuation is not going to be relevant to the accretion/dilution analysis unless you're trying to determine whether the transaction was net accretive at exit. But that's a weird analysis to do. For longer holding periods like that you're more likely to look at IRR, not EPS. EPS is something investors look at over the short to medium term to get a sense of whether the company is making good acquisition decisions. And to do that short-to-medium term analysis, they look at earnings.   Damodaran would say this is a shitty way of looking at things and that you should probably be looking at some measure of ROIC instead, and I tend to agree, but I don't get paid to think like an investor, I get paid to sell shit to them (if only in indirect fashion). The short answer to your question is that no, you should not incorporate what you are calling liquidation value when determining accretion/dilution, but only because the market typically computes accretion/dilution on a 3-year basis tops. I've never put together a book or seen a press release in my admittedly short time in finance that says ""the transaction is estimated to be X% accretive within 4 years"" - that just seems like an absurd timeline.  Final point is just that from an accounting perspective, a gain on a sale of an asset is not going to get booked in either EBITDA or OCF, so just mechanically there's no way for the IPO value to flow into your accretion/dilution analysis there, even if you are looking at EBITDA/shares. You could figure the gain on sale into some kind of adjusted EBITDA/shares version of EPS, but this is neither something I've ever seen nor something that really makes sense in the context of using EPS as a standardized metric across the market. Typically we take OUT non-recurring shit in EPS, we don't add it in. Adding something like this in would be much more appropriate to measuring the success of an acquisition/investing vehicle like a private equity fund, not a standalone operating company that reports operational earnings in addition to cash flow from investing. And as I suggest above, that's an analysis for which the IRR metric is more ideally situated.  And just a semantic thing - we typically wouldn't call the exit value a ""liquidation value"". That term is usually reserved for dissolution of a corporate entity and selling off its physical or intangible assets in piecemeal fashion (i.e. not accounting for operational synergies across the business). IPO value is actually just going to be a measure of market value of equity." I'm a finance newb....sorry ahead of time for everyone slamming their heads against the the wall.  I'm going to go ahead and possibly answer my own question. Do I just go back 4 months at a time from their 10K and record the stock price on that date?