The Lemon Fool

Itsallaguess wrote:[*]Fine-tune your portfolio to smooth monthly income throughout the year, ensure there are no periods without dividend payments, or shape your income to meet your needs

Does anyone out there really care about this?

Choosing an IT because it happened to pay in particular months of the year strikes me as a very odd thing to do.

I would hope that most people wanting to invest in ITs were not living their lives in such a hand to mouth way that they cannot go a few months without a dividend payment!

hiriskpaul wrote:

Itsallaguess wrote:
[*]Fine-tune your portfolio to smooth monthly income throughout the year, ensure there are no periods without dividend payments, or shape your income to meet your needs

Does anyone out there really care about this?

Choosing an IT because it happened to pay in particular months of the year strikes me as a very odd thing to do.

I would hope that most people wanting to invest in ITs were not living their lives in such a hand to mouth way that they cannot go a few months without a dividend payment!

I'd really hope not, although there does seem to be what might be called a small but steady-stream of investors to these boards, who consider dividend-payment dates as quite a high priority for some reason...

I'm with you, and I personally think that any robust dividend-income strategy would probably work best if it incorporated a separate account into which dividends are paid, and with that dividend-account holding enough of an income-buffer for it to be able to pay out regular monthly 'dividend pay-packets' into what we might consider to be our day-to-day bank-account.

If it all happened within the same account, it would be the same effect, but I personally like the idea of having all the background noise happening in a separate account, where I can also keep a good income-buffer ready at hand, thus keeping my day-to-day deposit account looking more or less like it looked whilst I was still working, with just a single regular packet of income to deal with...

That way, dividend-payment dates can be relegated in importance, to allow much more prominent investment-considerations to influence the decisions that we make when we invest for dividend-income.

I've posted about this in the past, and the last time I did so I created a diagram to help explain the above possible process -

https://www.lemonfool.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=16546&p=205179#p205179

I know you've quoted me above, in your post, but I should point out that I was only quoting the AIC Virtual Portfolio Tool description-page, and wasn't endorsing in any way the particular quote that you've highlighted. With that said, I'm grateful to you for raising this specific point, as it's given us both an opportunity to discuss it, and to point out why it might well not be a particularly good idea to be influenced, at all, by dividend-payment dates...

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

Similarly, I don't care about dividends dates or their distribution throughout the year. I'm living (in part at least) off the dividends in my SIPP, all I care about is that they amount to enough for me to make my single annual UFPLS withdrawal. This year it'll be £16,666 (to keep the taxable amount below the personal allowance and pay no income tax).

My X-year cash buffer is held elsewhere, of course.

Scott.

The AIC Income Builder gets a mention here

https://citywire.co.uk/investment-trust ... er+Weekend

Steve1982 wrote:

DavidM13 wrote:the company disappears from the list of companies when added to a current portfolio. But as soon as you wish to change or create another portfolio without EAT already in it, it will be available for selection again.

Since it sounds like development is still being done ... can I repeat my suggestion that it would be really useful if we were able to click on the names of companies in the income portfolio to go to their associated profile page? Currently, the only way to inspect the company profile from the Income Builder page is to go to the AIC Home page then search or view a watchlist.

Its particularly frustrating when this functionality is available in the "can be added" list - which shows all the companies NOT in my portfolio (& a bunch of non-AIC members that can't even be added to the income portfolio) - but not the actual companies I'm interested in.

Steve, your wish was our command. Please try now

That's great! Many thanks.

Any news on fixing the over-stated dividend amounts for European Assets? Otherwise, my income producing IT portfolio is reflected very well by the tool.

mickeypops wrote:Any news on fixing the over-stated dividend amounts for European Assets? Otherwise, my income producing IT portfolio is reflected very well by the tool.

I believe our data provider has removed the erroneous figures for January now and they also realised what was causing them so has fixed that bug up. Let us take January 2019. If I choose to have 10,000 shares for EAT, the Income Finder tells me for that month I receive £150.88p. That is to say the sterling equivalent dividend provided was 1.509p per share. This seems 0.1p a share higher than the value provided by HL which must be due to the currency exchange rate methodology used between the entities but the difference is no longer material since the duplicated dividend has been removed.

Two more enhancements just gone live after feedback by my lemon friends.

Copy Portfolio function – a user will likely want to duplicate a portfolio before adding/subtracting to it as they don’t want to destroy their original

Download function – a user can database or perform calculations on the numbers in their data tables with this excel download button

Hi DavidM13
I’ve had a little play with the AIC Income Builder. I am a few years away from designing an income portfolio & would be interested in reviewing different portfolios’ ‘robustness’ of maintaining regular payments over the years.

For example, let’s say a £100k portfolio was created on 01/01/2007. Would be keen to be able to ‘step through’ each year, seeing the monthly dividends paid and identifying those that cut their payments over time / maintained them. It would also be instructive to see how the capital value of the portfolio changed year-on-year.

In addition to TR v dividend paying ITs, am also looking to learn about what the Money Observer refers to as’ Enhanced’ dividend payers (i.e. dividend paid partly out of capital and partly income received) v. 'traditional' dividend paying ITs (from money received). Such a review of dividends and capital could help put things in context.

It might also help shed light on impact of selecting ITs with a lower initial dividend yield but committing to increasing these above inflation (say) versus those more than an initial higher dividend paying IT with a lower % increase each year.

Some time ago put a portfolio together in excel, downloaded all the dividend dates & payments from your website and created the above – but it was a clumsy and tiring way to achieve what your Income Builder could perhaps offer as a powerful piece of analysis. It would be great if it could help create a balanced portfolio that one might get a feel for how it might perform going forward (in of itself and & compared to other portfolios).

Thanks for reading.

TSH

Just been having a go with this myself. A very useful and well designed tool; congratulations David, and many thanks.

hiriskpaul wrote:

Itsallaguess wrote:[*]Fine-tune your portfolio to smooth monthly income throughout the year, ensure there are no periods without dividend payments, or shape your income to meet your needs

Does anyone out there really care about this?

Choosing an IT because it happened to pay in particular months of the year strikes me as a very odd thing to do.

I would hope that most people wanting to invest in ITs were not living their lives in such a hand to mouth way that they cannot go a few months without a dividend payment!

I assume some people who invest in ITs will be OCD enough to want to get all months filled with income! But I guess it could be very useful if, when choosing a new trust to add to, it shows the dividend dates - so if you're thinking of adding a particular type of fund, and there are many equally good ones to choose from in your shortlist, this is one way to narrow down your decision.

A request for a feature:

the capital currently allocated for the portfolio (sure its for income, but I'd like to see how much is invested to generate that income)

and another, which might be a bit too far removed from the tool's intent but I'd be interested:

the capital change from one year to the next - in that some trusts do not pay much income but rely on capital growth, some income investors would be interested in using that capital as income - so at the end of each year showing capital change (from a simplistic approach of buying in jan and seeing what excess growth was obtained at the end of the year for all previous years)

If the wonderful people at the AIC are taking requests, how about the ability to enter the book value of our shares so that the facility displays yield on book value, current yield, current value and current profit / loss - akin to the much missed Google portfolio facility.

Thank you.

Hi All,
I can assure you I am reading them all but can make no promises on further functionality. I do appreciate that there are extensions that can be made to the history or other changes to functionality but we are limited to what is practical due to development or data provision. And those guys at google know even more than I when it comes to financial tool development!

I did personal message a gent (or lady) on here on one issue and they are welcome to get back to me. I often miss PM notifications hence the nudge here.

Also for some of the comments above there are workarounds. e.g. You can see the Capital vs Income dividend split per financial year on the individual fund overview page. Or you can see the annual return performance of a fund using the "Interactive Statistics" functionality or setting up a "Watch-list" There is also an "interactive" performance chart for each company available. So even though not all is available within the same tool the data is generally on our website with a little bit of mining.

All the best

Diverse Income Trust is showing a dividend yield of 2.88% but it should be nearer 3.8% I think. Has one of the dividends been missed?

It paid 3.4p a share last year or 3.63p including a special dividend and as the share price is under £1 I don't understand why it is showing a yield under 3%.

Thanks

Bialystock wrote:Diverse Income Trust is showing a dividend yield of 2.88% but it should be nearer 3.8% I think. Has one of the dividends been missed?

It paid 3.4p a share last year or 3.63p including a special dividend and as the share price is under £1 I don't understand why it is showing a yield under 3%.

Thanks

Totally agree with your maths on all counts. I will follow up with M* right away. We wouldn't factor special in to the yield (as I think you already knew) but even at 3.4p there is something wrong with that picture. Apologies on their behalf, unless they can provide a good reason for the difference. Otherwise it will be fixed in the next update.

DavidM13 wrote:

Bialystock wrote:Diverse Income Trust is showing a dividend yield of 2.88% but it should be nearer 3.8% I think. Has one of the dividends been missed?

It paid 3.4p a share last year or 3.63p including a special dividend and as the share price is under £1 I don't understand why it is showing a yield under 3%.

Thanks

Totally agree with your maths on all counts. I will follow up with M* right away. We wouldn't factor special in to the yield (as I think you already knew) but even at 3.4p there is something wrong with that picture. Apologies on their behalf, unless they can provide a good reason for the difference. Otherwise it will be fixed in the next update.

The dividend for my portfolio holding for the last year looks about right, I only bought it in my ISA this month though, it is just the quoted yield that is wrong.

Bialystock wrote:

DavidM13 wrote:

Bialystock wrote:Diverse Income Trust is showing a dividend yield of 2.88% but it should be nearer 3.8% I think. Has one of the dividends been missed?

It paid 3.4p a share last year or 3.63p including a special dividend and as the share price is under £1 I don't understand why it is showing a yield under 3%.

Thanks

Totally agree with your maths on all counts. I will follow up with M* right away. We wouldn't factor special in to the yield (as I think you already knew) but even at 3.4p there is something wrong with that picture. Apologies on their behalf, unless they can provide a good reason for the difference. Otherwise it will be fixed in the next update.

The dividend for my portfolio holding for the last year looks about right, I only bought it in my ISA this month though, it is just the quoted yield that is wrong.

Yes, they have already agreed with that and fixed up. The historic dividends were fine just their forecast for this year was awry. Next time the website updates that will filter through.

DavidM13 wrote:

Bialystock wrote:

DavidM13 wrote:
Totally agree with your maths on all counts. I will follow up with M* right away. We wouldn't factor special in to the yield (as I think you already knew) but even at 3.4p there is something wrong with that picture. Apologies on their behalf, unless they can provide a good reason for the difference. Otherwise it will be fixed in the next update.

The dividend for my portfolio holding for the last year looks about right, I only bought it in my ISA this month though, it is just the quoted yield that is wrong.

Yes, they have already agreed with that and fixed up. The historic dividends were fine just their forecast for this year was awry. Next time the website updates that will filter through.

Cool