Online Stock Trading

After burning up one computer, transferring data to another, then having to upgrade that new one to handle the workload of the Very Large Dataset Project, I’ll be finally posting some results again. In addition to the computer upgrades, I had to create new code that would correct share price values from the past to automatically account for the effects of stock splits. Now it makes two passes, one Internet scrape for the fundamental data, another to correct pricing. The good news is that now it’s really, really cool.

The first analysis I’ve done since the upgrades is on dividend stocks (and funds). Because the market has been waffling and otherwise performing badly, many prudent people no doubt consider dividends to be means of offsetting some of those ugly falling and volatile stock prices. But, no one wants to buy a dividend stock, watch it sink 15% in 3 weeks and gleefully exclaim, “it has a 3% dividend!” So which dividend stocks have done well? In poor economic times, when companies’ profits are somewhat uncertain, many companies lower their dividend to reserve cash. Which companies (or funds) have held their dividend the same, or even better, who’s raised their dividend? Because risk is relatively high right now, and stocks could fall more, which would make a 2% dividend seem almost silly, who’s got a more meaningful yield (say, better than 5%)? Also, which stocks have done well, recently, during the time just since the credit crunch over the summer? The Dow peaked on July 19th, softened substantially, eventually peaked again on October 9th (but by then the “credit crunch” was front-page news) and has since been pretty lousy. The data I’m using is from the time period from July 20th to December 21st.

Good luck finding all that with a stock screener .

So here we have it. The following is a list of 91 stocks (or funds)—sorted by share price gain—who:

1. Have share prices that have gone up,
2. Have dividends that have either stayed the same (annual trailing) or have even gone up,
3. Have current dividend yields of greater than 5%, and
4. Have done all this since July 20th.

A quick note: several of the stocks/funds whose dividends have gone up have what appear to be one-time, non-regular dividends (in other words, their trailing yoy went up because of this reason—so keep your eyes open for these). If you would like to download this table in Excel, click here.