Released: Dividend dates in screener and more news features

Fri 11:05am by Alex Naamani

11 comments 1001 reads

John D. Rockefeller famously said, “Do you know the only thing that gives me pleasure? It's to see my dividends coming in.” For Rockefeller, dividends weren’t just a side benefit—they were a core part of his investment income. At times, nearly two-thirds of Standard Oil’s profits were paid out as dividends. Furthermore, some estimates suggest that Standard Oil once accounted for about 2% of the entire U.S. GDP. It’s easy to see why the saying goes, “rich as a Rockefeller.”

While dividend payouts have declined from the lofty heights of the Rockefeller-era, their appeal remains unchanged. Dividends provide investors with tangible cash returns. They can also signal a company’s financial health and stability. That’s why knowing which companies are paying dividends—and when—is essential information for any investor. With this in mind, we have introduced various features to help users find dividend dates quickly and easily.

We are also pleased to introduce a few further modifications to our News feed — the Stockopedia portal for finding, reading and assessing the impact of daily company news announcements. These build on our prior release and include simple bug fixes as well as more meaningful changes which we hope will help the way you use the feature.

As always, feedback and product suggestions are welcome in the comments below…

New screener functionality

We’ve enhanced the screener so you can filter stocks by dividend dates. It is possible to screen using ex-dates and payment dates (upcoming and historic).

Start by clicking ‘Add Rule’.

A modal popup box will appear, displaying dividend dates under the ‘Events’ section (see below-left).
You can choose Last to view historic dividends, or Next to see upcoming dividends.
Click the ‘Add rule’ button (see below-right).

The ‘days’ input box lets you set the timeframe. In this context, ‘days’ pertains to calendar days, not trading days.

Review dividend dates alongside key financial ratios

Many investors will want to track dividend dates alongside other dividend-related data points, such as yield, dividend cover, and dividend growth. You can do this by customising your portfolio tables to include columns for key dividend dates.

Tables will not include dividend dates by default, but you can easily add them by following these steps:

Click the Customise button in the upper right-hand corner of any table.
If you are interested in dividend data, you can use our ‘Income’ table view.

Dividend dates are found under the ‘Events’ section (see bottom-left).
Toggle between Last and Next using the dropdown shown below.
Finally, click ‘Apply changes’ (see bottom-right).

Check out this help page for more details on customising tables.

News enhancements

Building on our recent product enhancement, we've rolled out further updates to the News feed — Stockopedia’s hub for discovering, reading, and evaluating the impact of daily company announcements.

Page through news

We've added pagination to make browsing the news feed smoother — especially on smaller screens.

On the ‘Today’ page, click on a news item under ‘My Markets’ or ‘My Folios’.
Then use the ‘Previous’ and ‘Next’ button to page through news items.

Filters are now saved

It was clear that some of your prefer your default view to be Folios rather than the prior default of Markets. To assist with this, You can now save your default news filter, so that we remember your filters next time. For example, if you tick a given filter in the News portal, leave the page and later come back, the same filter will still apply.

Specific link to news item

We've introduced dedicated URLs, allowing you to access individual news stories directly via links in the Daily Stock Market Reports.

You can also share news stories via URL.

What shall we do next?

Our team is currently focused on upgrading the underlying portfolio system — It’s mostly technical work for now and we’ll be transitioning users to the new system gradually, in batches. For now, your product experience will remain the same, but our technical enhancements will lay the groundwork for powerful new portfolio analysis tools down the line.

We're also exploring ways to bring more date-based data into the Screener. If there are specific dates or metrics you'd like to filter by, we’d love to hear from you in the comments below. Thanks for all your feedback so far — it’s been great speaking with many of you about your experience with Stockopedia. Stay tuned for more updates!

Robert W

Fri 11:10am

Two ideas from me (and I am aware they have been asked for before).

1. Screener alerts for when a company meets screening criteria (and maybe the reverse?)

2. The ability to compare portfolio performance v a greater range of indexes including total return indexes.

marktrade

Fri 11:33am

Excellent feature, thanks guys.

johnsmith68

Fri 11:35am

Yes total return charts and performance would be great.

It would also be really good to be able to chart the Q,V,M and Stock ranks over time.

Kieranj077

Fri 12:35pm

Great to see the new features released and thanks for sharing the updates.

It would be helpful to screen for StockRank changes over a set period of time, rather than just the previous day. For example, companies where the StockRank, (or a specific Q,V,M rank) has increased by 20 points over a 3 month period.

The objective of this is to identify companies where the StockRank has increased/decreased over time. This might be due to a recent announcement that causes a spike up (or down) in the score.

Liam Mcquaid

Fri 12:44pm

Hi, would love to see dividend payments automated into the portfolio, I know you are looking into this but its a pretty basic feature of alot of other platforms, hope to see this rolled out very soon, thanks.

Lion Tamer

Fri 1:37pm

Great new features, I'll be using them a lot as dividends are a key metric for most of my portfolio holdings. Many thanks!!!

"What shall we do next?"

My wish list for portfolio enhancements are less to do with dates... but here's my top three anyway!

1) Bid/Offer price change (and % change data).
To show the figures for share gain/loss in a portfolio using the bid or offer price change (or %) rather than the last trade price. This is because a large spread can distort the percentage change shown depending if the last trade was a bid or offer price. Sticking to bid or offer price would offer better consistency.

2) Partial CSV imports.
At the moment I can import CSV portfolio data, but only for a whole new portfolio. I can't update an existing portfolio by importing only my latest trades from one of my "broker" portfolios to my "all data" portfolio. Furthermore if I wipe my "all data" portfolio and start again each time it needs updating, I get hundreds of rounding errors in historic trades (especially those trades inherited from the old legacy system that was retired some years ago). It would be nice to have an easier way to manage my "all data" portfolio - at the moment the best I can do is enter every trade twice - once in one of my "broker" portfolios and again in my "all data" portfolio.

3) Composite portfolio
I'd love to be able to create a composite portfolio that shows the total of all my active portfolios, reflecting any trades added to the underlying component portfolios. With this I would not need any of the CSV import enhancements in the above point 2. Just imagine it, I tick which portfolios I want included, and get an "all shares" view of my investments from all my active portfolios without any additional admin overhead. It's be so much easier than what I do now!

Many thanks for all the hard work you guys do behind the scenes. I appreciate it!

Mark L.

Fri 3:04pm

One area where Stockopedia could do with more data is on directors shareholdings. Ideally we should be able to see at a glance the list of directors and people with significant influence, and click through to their transactions and (as a%) how their holdings have changed.

There is a competitor shares site which I have used, and it allows for an alert if a director makes a significant share sale or purchase, It's useful, especially for small caps. I have discovered to my cost that often a large director sale is followed 6 to 12 month later by news that substantially lowers the share price.

The Boon Fund

Fri 4:04pm

Date based data in Screeners got me thinking...

Interesting filters would be like :

Share count has increased by more than X% in last Y months/years
Director buys/sells aggregate amount X or Y% in the last Y months/years
SR has moved by more than X in the last Y months/years

Cayman69

Fri 5:49pm

Great updates, thanks. I'd like to suggest a filter on the screens to exclude stocks in a chosen folio so that those I already own don't show up.

Adam Gibbons

Fri 7:02pm

I was looking into trying to create a script to modify my HGL portfolio .csv file for import. It would be great if someone with better knowledge them me created a dedicated importer for the top brokers, as I still cant get it quite right.

It also might be nice to see what the QVM was historically on the chart (currently only shows Stock Rank) and/or in your portfolio what the QVM and Stock Rank was on the day you bought a particular stock.

I realised that you can see your buys and sells when charting in your portfolio. Not sure if its technically possible, but it would be nice to see this on general charts as a red or green point. For instance if a stock in the news and daily report mentions a stock you own.

Monty Carlo

Fri 7:52pm

Hmmm - once bitten twice shy.

I once put several days into loading up the full trading & dividend histories of a few of my portfolios only to discover it was a complete and utter waste of time. I couldn't even chart performance against a total return index.

Unless Stocko commits to implementing total return I won't be making that mistake again.

Indeed, unless total return is implemented I'm not sure I see much of a future for Stocko I'm afraid, given what the competition now offer. Why are investors going to pay good money for algorithmic rankings from a provider that can't calculate single stock performance over a given time period, let alone the performance of a portfolio?!