Divicalc works again...

[petershk]

Hi All.

For those of you that used the divicalc.com tool that I put together a few years back, I spend a couple of days and got it working again.

It's not battle tested, so if you find bugs, please let me know.

For those of you who are interested what happened was that when Verizon bought Yahoo they aggressively closed all non-ad generating stuff. This pissed off a lot of developers who were making little financial apps.

There are not a lot of options for reliable, historical stock data that aren't insanely expensive but I managed to finally find one.

Also, most of the data sources tend to be geared to day traders or people who want to back test a few years... I really need a decade or more of information (preferably to the start of time ); so thank goodness I found that.

Anyway, feel free to comment if you find bugs or have requests. I'm not quite FIRE'd yet and have 2 young kids at home so time is at a premium but I really enjoy building tools like this!

Cheers.

 

[bobandsherry]

Ummm.. what is divicalc?

 

[ERD50]

Ummm.. what is divicalc?

And did it ever work?

When it worked, what did it do?

I'm in the dark on this. Op is talking like we all are intimately familiar this.

edit - ok, I see now that divicalc is a link (but not indicated as such). OK, it shows historical divs. Isn't that easy to find on the web?

-ERD50

 

[zinger1457]

I think the intent of the tool is to just show how much yearly income (distributions) one could have generated from a given investment over a period of time. The tool doesn't reinvest the distributions like most of us would do with our investments.

 

[FIRE'd@51]

The tool clearly isn't handling splits correctly. As a quick tryout, I entered Citigroup (C) for the default dates, and it didn't properly handle the 1 for 10 reverse split in March 2011. The program appears to be picking up the adjusted prices, but isn't adjusting the shares held.

 

[petershk]

Let me look into the splits thing. I tried splits but not reverse.

As for the other questions. I didn't want to over promote. There was an old thread when I first introduced the program but it's too old to reply to.

The idea was to have a simple way to claculate the earnings from dividends as well as the growth of the investment.

It was so I could answer my own questions about how a dividend portfolio might have returned annual and monthly income in the past.

I know there are lots of programs that calculate returns but I wanted something more simple and focused.

It was also fun and a way to keep my brain active and programming skills somewhat in shape.

Thanks!

 

[petershk]

Took a quick look at the splits problem with C. It turns out that I had splits working correctly in the dev version but a difference in configuration made that part of the data gathering not function for the live version. Should be working now.

That said, it created a very suspicious spike in 2002 when C looks like they did a special dividend in August. My app showed 24.15 which seemed impossible, so I looked at it should be 2.41. I looked at the underlying data source and it seems like it's an error in their data which is frustrating . I checked all the other dividends for Citibank and they look like they match official records so I'm not sure why this one is wrong.

If anyone sees any other problems, especially with special dividends, let me know.

 

[FIRE'd@51]

Took a quick look at the splits problem with C. It turns out that I had splits working correctly in the dev version but a difference in configuration made that part of the data gathering not function for the live version. Should be working now.

That said, it created a very suspicious spike in 2002 when C looks like they did a special dividend in August. My app showed 24.15 which seemed impossible, so I looked at it should be 2.41. I looked at the underlying data source and it seems like it's an error in their data which is frustrating . I checked all the other dividends for Citibank and they look like they match official records so I'm not sure why this one is wrong.

If anyone sees any other problems, especially with special dividends, let me know.

There are still errors in your Summary Data for Total Return and CAGR

 

[marko]

And did it ever work?

When it worked, what did it do?

I'm in the dark on this. Op is talking like we all are intimately familiar this.

edit - ok, I see now that divicalc is a link (but not indicated as such). OK, it shows historical divs. Isn't that easy to find on the web?

-ERD50

There are still errors in your Summary Data for Total Return and CAGR

Thanks petershk! I found this tool useful in the past and remember a few folks here asking what had happened to it. (ERD, OP brought this out a few years ago and there was a fair amount of discussion and trial at the time)

As far as the discrepancies, I see this tool as a 'close enough but not dead-on' thing.

I also use Google Finance and find that their numbers do not hit my actual numbers 100% accurately, but close enough for planning purposes; if divicalc is using similar source(s) that might explain it.

 

[ERD50]

I think the intent of the tool is to just show how much yearly income (distributions) one could have generated from a given investment over a period of time. The tool doesn't reinvest the distributions like most of us would do with our investments.

Doesn't this tool provide that option to not reinvest divs? It looks like if you create a free account, you can export the data to excel to sum up those annual divs.

www.portfoliovisualizer.com

https://goo.gl/JmA7Xt < I loaded with some examples


-ERD50