idpickering wrote:HYPMonkey wrote:I used to use Digital Look for forecast yields then dropped it when it was taken over by Sharecast -- which too laborious now.
I then used morningstar which was much better but it too is starting lose its usefulness with me as the data is getting more stale and out of date.
What is the current favourite tool/website that fools use for yield forecasts?
Ideally a web page that can be extracted into google sheets would be ideal.
Hi HYPMonkey, I now use dividendata, here;
https://www.dividenddata.co.uk/dividend ... alDiv=true
AFAIAA, that page (and more generally all of dividenddata) is giving historical dividends and yields, not the forecast yields HYPMonkey is asking for.
And no, sorry, I don't know of any very good source for forecast dividends and yields - I make do with DigitalLook / ShareCast and keeping a sanity-checking eye on the results, with the occasional look at Morningstar for a second opinion. Plus being aware of things that won't have fed through into the forecasts yet - e.g. a announcement of an intention to cut a future dividend will take variable amounts of time to feed through into individual analysts' forecasts, which means that the 'consensus' figures produced by sites like DigitalLook / ShareCast and Morningstar will gradually adjust, typically over a few months. In the meantime, I'll apply my own adjustments by making the 'forecast' be what the company says it will pay in future if they do say and making my own attempt at a forecast otherwise, since I want the intended dividend cut to be reflected in my HYP investment decisions immediately.
One other consideration of that type is the standard 'bonus element' adjustment to dividends when a rights issue goes ex-rights - it is a dividend reduction I expect to happen, but that will similarly take time to filter through into analysts' forecast dividends. A decent simple adjustment is to reduce the forecast dividend as the shares go ex-rights, in proportion to the ex-rights price drop so that the yield is unaffected by going ex-rights.
Another point is that everything I take about dividend forecasts from sites like DigitalLook / ShareCast and Morningstar is forecast dividend figures,
not forecast yield figures. The reason is just that I've encountered too many erroneous yield figures on them in the past, due generally to currency translation errors and/or dividing by non-current share prices. My spreadsheets are generally going to be updated for the current share prices anyway, and exchange rates where relevant, so their formulae might as well include doing the yield-calculating divisions.
Finally, yes, all of this sanity-checking and adjusting where necessary does make bringing the spreadsheets on which I base my HYP investment decisions up to date a rather bigger task than ideal... But that cloud has the silver lining of discouraging me from trading too often! ;
-)
Gengulphus