Is dividend included in EPS
"EPS is often earnings/diluted shares. That is counting shares as if all convertible securities (employee stock options for example) were converted. Looking at page 3 of Q4 2015 Reissued Earnings Press Release we find both basic ($1.13) and diluted EPS ($1.11). Dividends are not paid on diluted shares, but only actual shares. If we pull put this chart @ Yahoo finance, and hovering our mouse over the blue diamond with a ""D"", we find that Pfizer paid dividends of $0.28, $0.28, $0.28, $0.30 in 2015. Or $1.14 per share. Very close to the $1.13, non-diluted EPS. A wrinkle is that one can think of the dividend payment as being from last quarter, so the first one in 2015 is from 2014. Leaving us with $0.28, $0.28, $0.30, and unknown. Returning to page three of Q4 2015 Reissued Earnings Press Release, Pfizer last $0.03 per share. So they paid more in dividends that quarter than they made. And from the other view, the $0.30 cents they paid came from the prior quarter, then if they pay Q1 2016 from Q4 2015, then they are paying more in that view also." Not quite. The EPS is noted as ttm, which means trailing twelve months  --- so the earnings are taken from known values over the previous year. The number you quote as the dividend is actually the Forward Annual Dividend Rate, which is an estimate of the future year's dividends. This means that PFE is paying out more in the coming year (per share) than it made in the previous year (per share). No, dividends are not included in earnings.  Companies with no earnings sometimes choose to pay dividends.  Paying the dividend does not decrease earnings.  It does of course decrease cash and shows up on the balance sheet.  Many companies choose to keep the dividend at a fixed rate even while the business goes through cycles of increased and decreased earnings.
"You can calculate the ""return on investment"" using libreoffice, for example. Look at the xirr function. You would have 2 columns, one a list of dates (ie the dates of the deposits or dividends or whatever that you want to track, the last entry would be today's date and the value of the investment today. The xirr function calculates the internal rate of return for you. If you add money to the account, and the current value includes the original investment and the added funds, it will be difficult to calculate the ROI. If you add money by purchasing additional shares (or redepositing dividends by buying additional shares), and you only want to track the ROI of the initial investment (ignoring future investments), you would have to calculate the current value of all of the added shares (that you don't want to include in the ROI) and subtract that value from the current total value of the account. But, if you include the dates and values of these additional share purchases in the spreadsheet, xirr will calculate the overall IRR for you." Profit after tax can have multiple interpretations, but a common one is the EPS (Earnings Per Share).  This is frequently reported as a TTM number (Trailing Twelve Months), or in the UK as a fiscal year number.  Coincidentally, it is relatively easy to find the total amount of dividends paid out in that same time frame. That means calculating div cover is as simple as:  EPS divided by total dividend.  (EPS / Div). It's relatively easy to build a Google Docs spreadsheet that pulls both values from the cloud using the GOOGLEFINANCE() function.  I suspect the same is true of most spreadsheet apps.  With a proper setup, you can just fill down along a column of tickers to get the div cover for a number of companies at once. Vanguard (and probably other mutual fund brokers as well) offers easy-to-read performance charts that show the total change in value of a $10K investment over time.  This includes the fair market value of the fund plus any distributions (i.e. dividends) paid out.  On Vanguard's site they also make a point to show the impact of fees in the chart, since their low fees are their big selling point. Some reasons why a dividend is preferable to selling shares: no loss of voting power, no transaction costs, dividends may have better tax consequences for you than capital gains. NOTE:  If your fund is underperforming the benchmark, it is not due to the payment of dividends.  Funds do not pay their own dividends; they only forward to shareholders the dividends paid out by the companies in which they invest.  So the fair market value of the fund should always reflect the fair market value of the companies it holds, and those companies' shares are the ones that are fluctuating when they pay dividends. If your fund is underperforming its benchmark, then that is either because it is not tracking the benchmark closely enough or because it is charging high fees.  The fact that the underperformance you're seeing appears to be in the amount of dividends paid is a coincidence. Check out this example Vanguard performance chart for an S&P500 index fund.  Notice how if you add the S&P500 index benchmark to the plot you can't even see the difference between the two -- the fund is designed to track the benchmark exactly.  So when IBM (or whoever) pays out a dividend, the index goes down in value and the fund goes down in value. Stock prices are set by supply and demand. If a particular stock has a high EPS, say, $100, then people will bid more for that stock, driving up its price over one with a $10 EPS. Your job as an investor is to find stocks with low share prices, but which will give you high earnings (either in dividends, our future share price). This means finding stocks which you believe the market has priced incorrectly, for whatever reason (as an example, many bank stocks are being punished right now, even if the underlying banks are in good shape financially). If you want to beat the market indices, be prepared to do a lot of research, because you're trying to outsmart the market as a whole. From a federal tax point of view, withdrawals from 529 plans are treated as taxable unless they are used on qualified expenses: The part of a distribution representing the amount paid or contributed   to a QTP does not have to be included in income. This is a return of   the investment in the plan. The designated beneficiary generally does not have to include in   income any earnings distributed from a QTP if the total distribution   is less than or equal to adjusted qualified education expenses   (defined under Figuring the Taxable Portion of a Distribution ,   later). [...] To determine if total distributions for the year are more or less than   the amount of qualified education expenses, you must compare the total   of all QTP distributions for the tax year to the adjusted qualified   education expenses. You'll have to include them in your income and pay normal income tax on them, and also in most cases pay an extra 10% penalty: Generally, if you receive a taxable distribution, you also must pay a   10% additional tax on the amount included in income. You'd have to check on the situation from a state perspective but I'd imagine it's quite similar. The basic point is that non-qualified distributions are treated as earnings. Now assume these shares are vested, held for at least 1 year, and are   then sold for $5 each. Everything I've read implies that the grantee   now owes long-term capital gains taxes on the difference, which would   be 10k * ($5 - $1). No. That's exactly what the SO is NQ for. Read more on the differences between ISO and NQSO here. Now assume these shares are vested, held for at least 1 year, and are   then sold for $5 each. Everything I've read implies that the grantee   now owes long-term capital gains taxes on the difference, which would   be 10k * ($5 - $1). At this point you no longer have NQSO, you have RSU. If you filed 83(b) when  you exercised, then you pay capital gains tax when they vest. If you didn't - its ordinary income to you. NQSO is a red herring here since once exercised they no longer exist. If you didn't file 83(b), then when the stock vests the difference between the FMV at vest and the money you spent on it when exercising (if any) is considered wages and taxed as ordinary income (+FICA etc). From that point the RSU becomes a regular stock investment and the capital gains clock starts ticking. With the disclaimer that I am not a technician, I'd answer yes, it does. SPY (for clarification, an ETF that reflects the S&P 500 index) has dividends, and earnings, therefore a P/E and dividend yield. It would follow that the tools technicians use, such as moving averages, support and resistance levels also apply.  Keep in mind, each and every year, one can take the S&P stocks and break them up, into quintiles or deciles based on return and show that not all stock move in unison. You can break up by industry as well which is what the SPDRs aim to do, and observe the movement of those sub-groups.  But, no, not all the stocks will perform the way the index is predicted to.  (Note - If a technician wishes to correct any key points here, you are welcome to add a note, hopefully, my answer was not biased) "New SEC rules also now allow brokers to collect fees on non-dividend bearing accounts as an ""ADR Pass-Through Fee"". Since BP (and BP ADR) is not currently paying dividends, this is probably going to be the case here. According to the Schwab brokerage firm, the fee is usually 1-3 cents per share. I did an EDGAR search for BP's documents and came up with too many to read through (due to the oil spill and all of it's related SEC filings) but you can start here: http://www.schwab.com/public/schwab/nn/m/q207/adr.html"