What happened to Home Depot's Stock in 1988?
It's got to be a bad chunk of data on Google.  Yahoo finance does not show that anomaly for 1988, nor does the chart from Home Depot's investor relations site: So a major problem with looking at historical stock data on these graphs is that they set the stock price based off of current market volumn. If I was to say look at Majesco Entertainment (COOL) in june of 2016. It would say that the stock as trading between $5-6. In reality it was between .50-$1.  But in august there was a 6:1 reverse split. So June's value based on todays current share count would be about $5-6 per one share. 1988 for home depot must have been a really bad year for them, and because of all the splits they've had over the years already screws that estimate of what one share is worth. There's a lot of variance in 1988, but you have to be looking at only 1988. 87 and 89 really screws the the chart's scale.
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 My local Ace hardware store is my new favorite place.  It's definitely still the old school hardware store of my youth, aisles and aisles of fasteners of every kind with envelopes and pens to write down what you bagged.  All the little fiddly bits of plumbing and cabinet hardware you can spend 40 days searching for in a Home Depot or Lowe's and never find.  A crusty old geezer in the back who knows more than your dad when it comes to plumbing, concrete, framing, etc... Completely wrong. People are traveling less and Sears has chosen suburban malls requiring lots of space. Urban shopping malls (think Kohls, old navy, home depot, local grocery stores) are doing better, there is a uptick in buy local campaigns.   Also I think the economy is doing so well in terms of employment and wages have grown so little, that the desire and capability of many people to buy expensive and nice fridges and washer machines, watches and housewares because they a) have no time to enjoy them and b) would ratber spend the money on time saving/enjoyment. The retail companies that realize you need to entertain your customers and their families will win. First off, some companies do something like this.  Microsoft for example was well-known for consistently hitting earnings estimates every quarter - nearly never missed them, and most of the time didn't exceed by much either.  In order to do this and not be prosecuted for accounting fraud, you typically have to be a service or nontangible good company (like Microsoft used to be) where you can manipulate the amount of product on hand and move costs fairly easily from one quarter to the next.  A company like, say, Home Depot or Caterpillar - both of which have tangible goods they're either retailing or producing - has less flexibility there, although they will still try to move profits around to match earnings estimates more closely. However, you have to be consistently doing well to be able to do this.  You can't manufacture additional total revenue; so if you have one 'down' quarter, you have to either have moved some revenue into it from the previous quarter, or you have to be able to move some into it from the next quarter.  That obviously doesn't work consistently unless you're a fast-growing company, or have an extremely stable base.  It's also hard to do this in a legal-seeming fashion - technically this sort of manipulation is illegal, so decisions have to be justifiable.  Companies (like Microsoft) that are expanding can also do things to encourage slightly lower expectations.  A company in need of a stock price bump issues press releases touting its inventions and products as amazing things that will drive profits through the roof and an aggressive profit forecast - just as easy to issue a press release with a conservative forecast, meaning the bar will be lower to hit.   It's also not really necessary to manipulate earnings to have a consistently well-performing stock.  This article for example shows that companies who miss earnings estimates don't really suffer much (when controlling for their actual earnings changes, of course) in the long run.  Your price might drop a bit, but if your company is otherwise sound, it will recover. Finally, companies do sometimes come out with information ahead of earnings that cause expectations to be lowered.  7-Eleven for example just lowered its earnings expectations due to various reasons.  Some companies choose to do this in order to dilute the effect on the market.  I'm not sure if this is ever required, but it seems to me that some companies are much quicker to restate earnings expectations than others. The era ended a long time ago.  Sears effectively carried less and less quality merchandise and consistently more garbage year over year for nearly 15 years.  The local Sears here was a constant clearance sale of lousy brand clothing and a hodge lodge of things typically done far better elsewhere.  Their television department had a selection of 6 TVs to Best Buy's 80; their lingerie department was a few random shelves mixed into heaps of their low quality house brand Jessica products and a bizarre amount of real estate committed to Vanity Fair nylon briefs that haven't been in style since '53; their tools were a random mix of shop, yard and household standards available in more orderly arrangement from any genuine home or hardware outlet; and their men's suits were 8 racks with one brand name offering and a sprinkling of hideously ugly, ill-conceived, and off-trend coloured garbage in fabrics akin to cardboard.  In short, Sears had turned into a dump. That makes sense, no doubt there are a few market segments where Sears is good, like the hardware you mentioned. However, I do think that the average age of a Sears shopper vs. an Ikea or Walmart shopper is much higher. Even though in your case you bring the average down being only 35. If your planning on shorting the stocks be careful, while the value of the retail sector may be declining there will be a lot of back and forth over the next ten years, and as REITs discounts to nav increases, there is huge opportunities for buyouts from developers who have other use ideas for the real estate. The real estate will always have value, even if it's not as a shopping center. I haven't seen one of these in quite some time. Back in the 1970s, maybe the 1980s, stock brokers would occasionally send their retail clients a complimentary copy once in a while. Also, I remember the local newspaper would offer a year-end edition for a few dollars (maybe $3) and that edition would include the newspaper company's name on the cover. They were very handy little guides measuring 5 1/2 x 8 (horizontal) with one line devoted to each company. They listed hundreds of publicly traded companies and had basic info on each company. As you stated, for further info you needed to go to the library and follow-up with the big S&P and/or Moody's manuals. That was long before the internet made such info available at the click of a button on a home computer!