A near-real-time SEC filing companies must submit within 4 business days of any event a reasonable investor would want to know about — long before the next quarterly report. The form is organised into Items that label what happened. Most-frequent items you'll see in the Stock Modal's 10-K / 8-K / Risks tab:

• Item 1.01 — Entry into a Material Definitive Agreement (new credit facility, partnership, supply contract).
• Item 1.02 — Termination of a Material Definitive Agreement.
• Item 2.02 — Results of Operations & Financial Condition (the quarterly earnings press release — usually the first hard EPS/revenue numbers).
• Item 5.02 — Departure of Directors / Certain Officers; Election; Appointment; Compensatory Arrangements (CEO / CFO changes land here).
• Item 5.07 — Submission of Matters to a Vote of Security Holders (annual meeting results, say-on-pay votes).
• Item 7.01 / 8.01 — Regulation FD Disclosure / Other Events (catch-all for material announcements).
• Item 9.01 — Financial Statements & Exhibits (the index showing what documents are attached).

In DiviDrip, the Stock Modal's 10-K / 8-K / Risks tab shows the last 10 8-K events with Item-code chips. Tap the ★ next to any 8-K to pin it to your Watchlist (auto-adds the ticker if it's not already watched). See also: 10-K, Risk Factors.

The big once-a-year SEC filing every U.S. public company must submit. Far more thorough than the slick glossy annual report mailed to shareholders — the 10-K is audited, written for regulators, and includes things the marketing version leaves out. The DiviDrip Stock Modal's 10-K / 8-K / Risks tab surfaces the two sections most useful to dividend investors:

• Business Overview (Item 1) — the company's own description of what it does, who its customers are, where it competes. Reading this once a year for every holding is the single highest-ROI research habit.
• Risk Factors (Item 1A) — every material risk management is legally required to disclose (cyber, regulatory, supply chain, key-customer concentration, etc.). DiviDrip categorises every risk row and shows a YoY Disclosure Trend mini-chart at the top — at a glance you can see whether the company is bracing investors for more or fewer risks this year vs last.

Tap the ★ next to either section title to pin that filing to your Watchlist. See also: 8-K, Risk Factors.

The average closing price over the last 50 trading days. A common short-term trend indicator — when the current price crosses ABOVE its 50-day average, technical traders read momentum as positive; below, negative. The 50-day crossing the 200-day (the "golden cross" or "death cross") is watched even more closely.

The lowest and highest prices the stock has traded at over the past 52 weeks (rolling, not calendar year). A common quick gauge of momentum — stocks near the 52-week high are trending up, near the low are out-of-favour or troubled. Watchlists often filter on "near 52-week low" to surface beaten-down dividend candidates.

The average closing price over the last 200 trading days. The long-term trend baseline. A stock above its 200-day average is in a long-term uptrend; below it, a downtrend. The most widely watched moving average among institutional traders.

A DiviDrip game/feature focused on Dividend Achievers — companies that have raised their dividend for 10+ consecutive years. Track which Achievers you own, see your coverage of the full list, and find names you might want to add.

A U.S.-listed certificate issued by a U.S. bank that represents shares of a foreign company. ADRs trade on NYSE/NASDAQ in U.S. dollars and pay dividends in USD, so American investors can hold international names without a foreign brokerage account or currency conversion. The underlying foreign-stock price still drives the ADR price, so currency moves and Foreign Withholding Tax still affect your returns — the country whose treaty rate applies is surfaced as a small country-flag emoji on the pink "ADR" badge (e.g. KSPI 🇰🇿, BABA 🇨🇳, SHEL 🇬🇧, TM 🇯🇵). See also: ADS, ADR Tax Drag, Foreign Withholding Tax (WHT), Foreign Tax Credit (FTC), Tax Treaty Rate, Sponsored ADR / Unsponsored ADR.

How much annual dividend income your ADR positions lose to Foreign Withholding Tax each year — surfaced as an amber banner directly below the Income Concentration banner on each portfolio. The math walks every ADR position in the portfolio with a known treaty rate (e.g. KSPI 15%, BABA 10%, NESN 35%) and computes shares × dividend_rate × (rate_pct / 100), then sums them. The banner displays gross annual dividends, dollars withheld, and the up-to-recoverable amount via the Foreign Tax Credit (Form 1116). Per-ticker chips are sorted by impact (biggest drag first) and clicking any chip opens the Stock Modal for that ADR. The same per-position math also renders inside the Stock Modal Insights tab (ADR Withholding-Tax Estimator card) and the My Position tab (per-account-type breakdown). Self-hides when the portfolio holds no ADRs with a withholding-tax rate. See also: ADR, Foreign Withholding Tax (WHT), Foreign Tax Credit (FTC), Tax Treaty Rate.

The actual underlying share that an ADR certificate represents. The terms ADR and ADS are often used interchangeably — the ADS is the share itself, the ADR is the receipt of ownership. Don't confuse this with the unrelated "Depositary Share" sense used for fractional preferred shares of U.S. companies (e.g. FRMEP) — those are not ADRs. See also: ADR, Depositary Share.

Pronounced "A-F-F-O" (each letter). The REIT world's version of "earnings that can actually pay dividends". Takes FFO (Funds From Operations) and subtracts recurring capital expenses like maintenance, tenant improvements, and leasing commissions — the real-world cash costs of keeping the buildings rentable. AFFO is considered the most reliable dividend-coverage metric for REITs because it reflects the cash actually left over for shareholders after the property is maintained. This is why DiviDrip's Quality Score uses a relaxed 90% payout-ratio cap for REITs (vs the usual 75% for regular stocks) — because the "payout ratio" you see on a REIT is often calculated against GAAP earnings, which dramatically understates a REIT's true earning power once non-cash depreciation is stripped out. The DiviDrip Stock Modal also surfaces an FFO-based "REIT Cash Lens" panel for any flagged REIT (FFO is what we can compute cleanly from yfinance — actual AFFO is usually 5-15% lower because it nets out recurring capex that lives only in the company's supplemental filing). See also: FFO, NOI, REIT Cash Lens, REIT, Why EPS Lies for REITs.

A 5-variable bankruptcy-prediction formula developed by NYU finance professor Edward Altman in 1968 — still used by every credit analyst on Wall Street nearly 60 years later. Combines working-capital, retained earnings, EBIT, equity value, and sales ratios into one number. The original 1968 paper used zones of Z > 2.99 = "Safe", 1.81–2.99 = "Grey", Z < 1.81 = "Distress" for industrial manufacturers. DiviDrip uses the MODIFIED Altman thresholds (Altman & Hotchkiss revision) calibrated for modern balance sheets with heavy intangible assets: Z > 2.90 = "Safe Zone", 1.23–2.90 = "Grey Zone", Z < 1.23 = "Distress Zone". The Modified Z is also tuned for biotech and other negative-revenue names so early-stage drug developers do not auto-fail the Tail-Risk factor purely for being pre-revenue. The Altman zone is shown on the Capital Analytics tab inside the Forensic Safety & Momentum panel. See also: Beneish M-Score, Tail-Risk (Forensic Safety), Capital Quality Rank.

A consensus rating from Wall Street analysts ranging from Strong Buy → Buy → Hold → Sell → Strong Sell. Useful as a quick sentiment check, but always do your own research — analysts are often late to downgrades.

The % per year you expect your dividends to grow — modelled as a compound annual rate. Historical S&P 500 average is roughly 5-6%; Dividend Kings often grow 7-10%+. Shown as the purple slider in the What If? page's Time Machine card, and applied to every position's dividend rate each simulated year.

The expected dividend payout over the next 12 months in dollars per share. For most stocks this is the most recent quarterly dividend × 4. The dividend yield you see is calculated as Annualized Dividend ÷ Current Price.

A dividend frequency where the company pays out one dividend per year. Less common than quarterly because the long gap between checks makes income planning harder. Some European holding companies and a few legacy U.S. names still pay annually. See "Dividend Frequency" for the full list of frequencies (Weekly / Monthly / Quarterly / Semi-Annually / Annually).

A DiviDrip game/feature focused on Dividend Aristocrats — S&P 500 companies that have raised their dividend for 25+ consecutive years. Track your coverage of the list and discover blue-chip names you do not yet own.

A ten-country economic and political bloc formed in 1967: Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia. Combined population of roughly 670 million and combined GDP over $3.6 trillion by 2024 — the fifth-largest economic region in the world. For non-dividend growth investing, ASEAN matters because it is one of the fastest-growing consumer regions on earth: a young, mobile-first, digitally-native population that is skipping desktop-era commerce entirely and adopting super-app platforms like Shopee (SE), Grab (GRAB), and GoTo directly. ASEAN-focused ADRs typically carry currency exposure to the Singapore dollar, Indonesian rupiah, Vietnamese dong, and Malaysian ringgit — none of which are freely-floating major currencies, so realized dollar returns can diverge meaningfully from local-currency stock performance.

How an ETF or fund splits its holdings across stocks, bonds, cash, and other asset types. Surfaced in the Stock Metrics tab for ETFs/CEFs to show what is actually inside the fund.

The total dollar value of all assets a fund (ETF, CEF, or mutual fund) currently manages on behalf of investors. The single most important "is this fund going to stick around?" gauge — large AUM (above $1 billion) generally signals broad institutional adoption, plenty of trading liquidity, and very low closure risk. Below $250 million is the classic "fund closure" red zone: small funds get shut down all the time when the sponsor decides they're not profitable to run, and unitholders are forced to sell on the closure date (potentially triggering a taxable event you didn't want). DiviDrip's Buy Checklist uses ≥ $1 B as the AUM target for ETFs because that's the threshold where closure risk becomes negligible and bid/ask spreads tighten. AUM grows from net inflows (more buyers than sellers) and from underlying asset appreciation — both are healthy. Don't confuse AUM with Market Cap: Market Cap is the total value of a company's outstanding shares; AUM is the total value of the assets a fund holds.

Average Income-Reliability score across all holdings, scored 1 (safest — big cap Kings/Aristocrats) to 10 (most speculative — high-yield CEFs/BDCs/covered-call ETFs). Drivers include payout ratio sustainability, dividend tier, yield level, leveraged or futures exposure, and fund type (CEF / BDC). Shown as a colored badge (emerald 1-3 Safe · amber 4-6 Moderate · rose 7-10 Risky) on portfolio rows, the stock modal, and as a 4th metric card in the What-If result cards.

The average number of shares traded per day over the trailing 3 months — a baseline for "normal activity" on a ticker. Compare today's Volume against Avg Volume to spot unusual moves: a stock trading 3-5× its average is usually responding to news (earnings, dividend hike/cut, M&A rumor, analyst upgrade, regulatory event), while one trading well below average is in a quiet drift. DiviDrip surfaces a small pill next to today's Volume when the ratio crosses these bands: ≥3× avg = amber "heavy" pill (worth checking the Insights / News tabs), ≥2× avg = emerald "above-average" pill, ≤0.4× avg = slate "light" pill. Between bands no pill renders — clutter-free. Low Avg Volume (under ~50,000 shares/day for a US-listed ETF) signals an illiquid name where bid/ask spreads will eat into your return on entry and exit; many DiviDrip Buy Checklists flag this directly.

An exchange-traded corporate DEBT security — a bond issued in small $25 denominations so it can trade on stock exchanges alongside common shares. When you buy one (e.g. GECCG), you are LENDING money to the issuer, not buying ownership equity. The issuer is legally obligated to pay a fixed coupon (e.g. 7.75%) on the $25 par value until the bond matures, then return the full $25 principal. "Baby" because the $25 face value is far below the institutional $1,000+ bond standard — designed to be retail-friendly. Yields look high (often 7-9%) because the coupon is locked at issuance regardless of where the market price moves. Traditional stock-screener math breaks on these — DiviDrip tags them with asset_class="baby_bond" and overrides the dividend calculation to par × coupon. See also: Fixed-Rate Asset, Par Value, Coupon Rate, Maturity Date, Call Risk.

A simulation that uses REAL historical Yahoo prices and dividend events to replay what your current portfolio would have done over the last N years. Unlike a forward projection (which assumes a growth rate), a backtest uses actual market data month-by-month so you can see how DCA, DRIP, and your holdings actually performed through real market conditions. Toggle "Reverse Mode 🔮" in the What If? page's Time Machine card to run one.

A type of closed-end investment fund, created by the U.S. Congress in 1980, that provides capital to small- to mid-sized businesses and financially distressed companies. By law, BDCs must invest at least 70% of their assets in private or small public U.S. firms, and by electing regulated-investment-company (RIC) status they avoid corporate-level tax if they distribute at least 90% of taxable income to shareholders — which is why yields of 8-12% are normal (not necessarily yield traps). BDCs trade on major exchanges, letting public investors access private-credit-like returns. Higher-risk than typical equities due to exposure to private/illiquid company debt and frequent use of leverage. Tagged with an indigo "BDC" badge throughout DiviDrip. Examples: Main Street Capital (MAIN), Ares Capital (ARCC), Blue Owl (OBDC), Hercules Capital (HTGC).

An 8-variable earnings-quality screen developed by Indiana University accounting professor Messod Beneish in 1999, originally trained on a dataset of confirmed accounting frauds. Combines days-sales-outstanding growth, gross margin trend, asset-quality changes, sales growth, depreciation, SG&A growth, leverage, and total accruals into a single score. A reading "above −1.78" (i.e. not below it) flags possible earnings manipulation. Notable hits: caught Enron 3 years before the 2001 collapse, also flagged WorldCom and Tyco. Used in DiviDrip's Capital Analytics Tail-Risk factor — a flagged M-Score caps the composite score at 80% of its unflagged value, deliberately throttling the rank on companies that look "too good to be true". Not a guarantee of fraud — many flagged names are just aggressive accountants. See also: Altman Z-Score, Tail-Risk (Forensic Safety), Capital Quality Rank.

A measure of how much a stock moves relative to the broader market (S&P 500 = 1.0). Beta below 0.8 means the stock is less volatile than the market — calmer ride. Beta above 1.2 means bigger swings up and down — more volatile, higher risk/reward. A beta of 1.0 means it tracks the market roughly in line.

A loan you make to a government or company. In return, the borrower agrees to pay you regular interest (called the "coupon") and give you your principal back on a set future date (the "maturity"). Bonds are the most common kind of fixed-income investment and sit lower on the risk ladder than stocks because bondholders get paid before shareholders if the company runs into trouble. The trade-off: bonds usually offer steadier but smaller returns than stocks over the long run.

Bonds are graded by independent credit agencies (Moody's, S&P, Fitch) on a letter scale. The grade tells you how likely the borrower is to actually pay you back. Common bond categories you'll see in fund prospectuses:

• Investment Grade Bonds: Rated BBB- / Baa3 or higher. Issued by financially strong governments and blue-chip companies. Lower yields, lower default risk. Considered "safe enough for pension funds" by regulators.
• AAA Bonds: The single highest credit rating possible. Reserved for the most rock-solid borrowers (a handful of governments and a few mega-cap corporations). Lowest yields, lowest default risk historically. AAA-rated CLO tranches have, to date, never defaulted.
• BB+ Bonds: The top notch of the "below investment grade" band — also called High-Yield or Junk bonds. Higher yields to compensate for higher default risk. BB+ is the highest junk rating, just one step below investment grade. Funds like JBBB target this band specifically.
• High-Yield (Junk) Bonds: Anything rated BB+ or below. Higher coupons, but real default risk in a recession. Often issued by smaller or more leveraged companies.
• Perpetual Bonds: Bonds with NO maturity date — they pay coupons forever (or until the issuer chooses to call them). Common with banks (used to satisfy regulatory capital rules) and some sovereign issuers. Higher yields because your principal may never come back; price-sensitive to interest rates.
• Government / Treasury Bonds: Issued by sovereign governments. U.S. Treasuries are the global benchmark for "risk-free" debt. Typically lower yields, used as portfolio ballast.
• Municipal Bonds: Issued by U.S. states, counties, and cities. Interest is usually exempt from federal (and sometimes state) income tax — popular in taxable brokerage accounts.
• Corporate Bonds: Issued by companies. Span the full quality range from AAA to deep junk. The bulk of most bond ETFs.

See also: CLO (Collateralized Loan Obligation), Securities, Tranches, Hedge (Hedging).

The accounting value of a company's assets minus its liabilities, divided by shares outstanding. Roughly: what the company would be worth if it shut down today and sold everything. Compared to the share price using the Price/Book ratio.

A standard non-retirement investment account. You can deposit and withdraw freely with no age restrictions, but you owe taxes every year on dividends received and capital gains realized. Less tax-efficient than IRAs, but gives total flexibility.

A non-dividend stock's "dilution-adjusted buyback efficiency" — how much of every gross buyback dollar management actually used to shrink the diluted share float, versus how much was absorbed by employee stock-option grants and stock-based-compensation (SBC) issuances. Sits on the Capital Analytics tab between the Forensic Safety panel and the Shareholder Alignment row; data refreshed every 7 days.

Math:

• Gross Buyback Spend = annual dollars management spent repurchasing shares (from the most recent annual cash-flow filing).
• Float Reduction Value = (shares retired YoY) × the 5-day VWAP price. Negative when the diluted share count actually GREW.
• Effectiveness % = (Float Reduction Value ÷ Gross Buyback Spend) × 100.
• Absorbed = Gross Buyback Spend − Float Reduction Value. The dollar value that did NOT shrink your ownership stake.

Tier interpretation:

• 75%+ — Highly effective. Each buyback dollar meaningfully concentrates your ownership.
• 50–75% — Mostly effective. Modest dilution from option grants is expected at scale.
• 25–50% — Mixed. A meaningful slice of buyback cash is being absorbed by new issuance — track quarter-over-quarter.
• 0–25% — Leaky. Buybacks are masking, not offsetting, employee equity grants. Textbook "dilution leak."
• Negative — Net dilution. The company spent cash on buybacks AND issued more new shares than it bought back. Management comp is being silently funded by existing shareholders.

Why it matters: A headline buyback announcement of "$10B over 3 years" sounds great until you discover the company also handed out $9B in stock-based comp over the same window — the float barely budged. Buyback Effectiveness collapses that whole story into one number so you can compare capital-allocator discipline across companies at a glance.

Caveats: The denominator uses ANNUAL data, so M&A-driven share issuance in a single year (e.g. an all-stock acquisition) can crush the score for one cycle without signaling poor allocation. Cross-check with Share Float YoY and the company's acquisition history before declaring a verdict.

See also: Shareholder Yield (Net Buyback Yield), Shares Outstanding, Capital Quality Rank (1–100), CFROI (Cash-Flow Return on Invested Capital), VWAP Market Cap (5-day), Capital Analytics Composite Score.

The smoothed annualized rate of growth between two points in time, accounting for compounding. Example: a dividend that grew from $1.00 to $1.61 over 5 years had a 5-year CAGR of about 10%. Used in DiviDrip to summarize dividend, EPS, and revenue growth over multi-year periods.

The risk that the issuer of a bond, baby bond, or preferred share buys it back from you earlier than maturity — usually at par ($25) — leaving you to reinvest the cash at whatever (typically lower) yields are available at the time. Most fixed-rate assets are "callable" starting on a published Call Date (often 5 years after issuance). After that date the issuer can redeem at par on any future coupon date, with 30 days' notice. Call risk matters most when an asset trades ABOVE par — e.g. a 7.75% baby bond trading at $27 still pays $1.94/yr in coupons, but if it gets called you only receive $25 back, locking in a $2 capital loss. This is why fixed-rate assets tend to cap their price upside near par as the call date approaches. Yield-to-call (YTC) — the return assuming the issuer calls on the first eligible date — is often a more honest yield measure than current yield for premium-priced preferreds. See also: Baby Bond, Preferred Shares, Par Value, Coupon Rate, Fixed-Rate Asset.

The raw weighted average of the 4 Capital Quality factors (Shareholder Yield 30%, CFROI 25%, Operating Momentum 25%, Tail-Risk 20%) BEFORE percentile-ranking against sector peers. Expressed in z-score units, roughly −2.5 to +2.5. Useful when you want to see the absolute factor signal before sector winsorization smooths it out. The 1–100 Capital Quality Rank is what users see on the Capital Analytics tab; the composite score sits behind it for analyst-grade comparisons. See also: Capital Quality Rank, CFROI, Shareholder Yield, Operating Momentum, Tail-Risk, Sector-Neutralized Scoring.

DiviDrip's sector-neutral quality score for every non-dividend stock in the universe. Ranks each company against its GICS-sector peers on 4 weighted factors — so a biotech is compared to other biotechs, not to a utility. Recomputed weekly by the Sunday cron.

The 4 factors:

• Shareholder Yield (30%) — true net change in share count expressed as a yield. Positive = company is shrinking the float and returning capital. Negative = stock-based comp is outpacing buybacks.
• CFROI (25%) — operating cash flow ÷ invested capital. The honest "is the business actually compounding capital?" check.
• Operating Momentum (25%) — TTM operating margin change vs prior TTM. Catches inflections before EPS or stock price react.
• Tail-Risk (20%) — composite of Altman Z-Score and Beneish M-Score. Penalises balance-sheet distress and accounting-quality flags.

Rank interpretation: 90+ = top decile within sector (Market alpha verdict); 70–89 = strong relative quality; 40–69 = average; under 30 = bottom tercile drag on the model. Click "Capital Analytics" tab on any non-dividend stock to see the full breakdown.

See also: CFROI (Cash-Flow Return on Invested Capital), Shareholder Yield (Net Buyback Yield), Operating Momentum, Tail-Risk (Forensic Safety), Sector-Neutralized Scoring, Capital Analytics Composite Score, Capital Reinvestment Score.

The customer-facing 0–100 quality score displayed at the top of the Capital Analytics tab on every non-dividend stock. Mechanically it is the same number as the Capital Quality Rank (1–100) — the two names refer to the identical percentile score. “Capital Reinvestment Score” is the friendlier label surfaced in the UI and cross-referenced by the Learn guides; “Capital Quality Rank” is the technical name used inside the ranking engine.

What it measures: How effectively a non-dividend company is reinvesting its retained earnings, benchmarked against its GICS-sector peers. A high score means the reinvestment engine is producing durable returns on capital, shareholders are not being diluted, operating margins are trending up, and the balance sheet is clean of forensic red flags. A low score means at least one of those legs is broken.

How it's built: A weighted composite of four Capital Analytics factors — Shareholder Yield (30%), CFROI (25%), Operating Momentum (25%), and Tail-Risk (20%) — sector-neutralised so scores are comparable across industries. Rank interpretation: 85+ = fortress compounder; 70–84 = strong candidate; 60–69 = mixed signals, worth a deeper read; below 60 = engine has visible problems.

Where you see it: Top of the Capital Analytics tab on any non-dividend ticker in DiviDrip. Also appears in Learn guides as the canonical composite score for non-dividend stock evaluation. The raw pre-percentile version (in z-score units) is exposed separately as the Capital Analytics Composite Score.

See also: Capital Quality Rank (1–100), Capital Analytics Composite Score, CFROI (Cash-Flow Return on Invested Capital), Shareholder Yield (Net Buyback Yield), Operating Momentum, Tail-Risk (Forensic Safety).

The hierarchical ladder of who gets paid first when a company generates cash — or who eats losses first when it can't pay everyone. Top of the ladder = safest but lowest yield. Bottom = riskiest but highest potential reward. Every fixed-rate asset in DiviDrip sits somewhere on this ladder; the slot determines its risk profile far more than the headline yield does.

From safest (paid first) to riskiest (paid last):

• Senior Secured Debt — first-lien loans backed by specific collateral. Banks, secured bonds. Paid first in bankruptcy; recovery rates ~70-90%.
• Senior Unsecured Debt — most corporate bonds and baby bonds (e.g. GECCG, GECCH). No specific collateral but still ahead of equity. Recovery ~40-60%.
• Subordinated Debt — paid after senior creditors. Higher coupons to compensate. Recovery ~15-30%.
• Preferred Stock / Preferred Units — equity, not debt, but with a fixed dividend that has priority over common. Recovery in bankruptcy is usually near zero, but in a going-concern company they get paid before common dividends can resume.
• Common Stock — bottom of the stack. Last in line in bankruptcy (usually wiped out). All upside from growth, all downside from disaster. Common dividends are NEVER legally required and can be cut at any board meeting.

Why it matters for income investors: a 7% yield on a baby bond carries fundamentally different risk than a 7% yield on a common stock — even from the same issuer. The baby bond is a legal obligation backed by debt covenants; the common dividend is a discretionary cash payment the board can suspend on a quarter's notice.

See also: Baby Bond, Preferred Shares, Bonds, Hybrid Security.

Net cash a company generates from its core business — collecting from customers, paying suppliers and employees, settling taxes, etc. Reported as the top section of the cash flow statement, BEFORE investing activities (capex) and financing activities (dividends, buybacks, debt). Crucially different from Net Income, which contains non-cash items like depreciation, amortization, and accrual-based revenue recognition. CFO + Capex = Free Cash Flow — the single most important math for dividend safety. Healthy mature businesses typically grow CFO every year; a company whose CFO is falling year-over-year while net income still rises is often masking deteriorating business quality with accounting flattery. See also: Free Cash Flow, Capex (Capital Expenditures), Net Margin, Dividend FCF Coverage.

(Cash + Short-Term Investments) ÷ Current Liabilities. The strictest liquidity check on a company — can it pay every short-term bill TODAY using only the cash sitting in the bank, with no need to sell inventory, collect receivables, or refinance? Above 0.5 is very strong; above 1.0 is exceptional and signals a "war-chest" balance sheet (Apple, Berkshire Hathaway, Microsoft are classic examples). Below 0.2 means the company is one bad quarter away from needing to draw on its credit line. Less useful than Current Ratio or Quick Ratio for healthy companies (who don't need to convert everything to cash on a Tuesday) but very useful as a stress-test screen. See also: Current Ratio, Quick Ratio (Acid Test).

A publicly-traded investment fund that raises a fixed pool of capital through an IPO and then trades on a stock exchange like a regular stock. Unlike open-end mutual funds and ETFs, the share count is fixed — meaning the fund's market price can trade at a premium or (usually) discount to NAV based on supply and demand. CEFs can use leverage (typically up to 30-40% of assets) to amplify income and total return, hold less-liquid assets that ETFs can't easily wrap, and historically pay strong distributions — often monthly with 6-12% yields. Many distribute "Return of Capital" (ROC) instead of, or alongside, ordinary income; check the fund's Section 19a notice to understand the source of payouts. Tagged with a teal "CEF" badge throughout DiviDrip. Examples: PIMCO Dynamic Income (PDI), Reaves Utility Income (UTG), Gabelli Equity Trust (GAB), Nuveen AMT-Free Quality Muni (NEA), BlackRock Science & Technology (BST).

Operating Cash Flow ÷ (Long-Term Debt + Total Equity invested in the business). The most honest "is the business actually compounding capital?" check — uses real cash, not accounting earnings that can be massaged through depreciation timing, accrual revenue recognition, or one-off write-downs. Healthy benchmark by sector: > 15% = exceptional capital allocator (Visa, MSFT, MA classic examples), 5–15% = healthy mature business, 0–5% = marginal (high reinvestment needs or low pricing power), < 0% = currently burning cash on operations. CFROI is one of the 4 factors in DiviDrip's Capital Quality Rank (25% weight) and shown in the "Forensic Diagnostics" panel of the Capital Analytics tab. See also: Capital Quality Rank, Cash from Operations (CFO), ROIC, Free Cash Flow.

A quick screening number that adds a stock's current dividend yield to its 5-year dividend growth rate (CAGR). Created by Seeking Alpha contributor "Chowder" (Steve Bavaria) as a one-line shorthand for "Is this a real dividend-growth opportunity — or just a high yield with no growth behind it?" The rule of thumb is asset-class-aware: ≥12 for low-yield (under 3%) blue-chip dividend growers, ≥8 for typical mid-yield stocks, and ≥8 for REITs and high-yield specialty names. A 5% yielder growing the dividend at 7% per year scores 12 (passes); a 9% yielder growing at 1% scores 10 (high yield mostly bought, not grown). DiviDrip surfaces the Chowder Score at the top of the Buy Checklist on the Triangle tab. It is informational only — passing Chowder doesn't override a failed payout-ratio or coverage check, but failing Chowder is a strong signal the dividend is high-yield-low-growth or low-yield-low-growth (the worst combination). Excluded for pure income ETFs/CEFs where company-level growth doesn't apply.

A bundle of corporate loans — usually senior, secured, below-investment-grade (junk-rated) loans to mid- and large-cap companies — packaged together and sliced into tranches that pay investors at different priority levels. Think of a CLO as a layer cake: the bottom layer (equity tranche) absorbs losses first but earns the highest return when things go well; the top layer (AAA tranche) gets paid first and is therefore the safest. CLO managers actively buy and sell loans inside the pool to keep credit quality healthy and react to defaults. Banks like CLOs because they let them offload loan risk and free up capital; income investors like them because the AAA tranches have historically delivered higher yields than similarly-rated corporate bonds with comparable safety — no AAA-rated CLO tranche has ever defaulted (per Janus Henderson and BlackRock). The flip side: CLOs are sensitive to economic downturns, corporate-default cycles, and floating interest rates. Fund examples: JAAA (AAA-only CLO ETF), JBBB (BBB-and-up CLO ETF), AAA, ICLO. See also: Bonds, Securities, Tranches.

In the context of dual-class Brazilian ADRs (e.g., BBDO), "ON" stands for "Ordinárias" — common shares that carry voting rights at shareholder meetings and 100% tag-along rights, but receive a slightly lower base dividend than preferred shares.

A side-by-side modal launched from the Watchlist Snapshot card (visible when your Watchlist has 2+ tickers). Stacks up to 6 watchlist tickers as columns and shows each Quality Score pillar as a row (Safety / Yield / Growth / Longevity / Fundamentals / Penalty / Composite). The leader of each pillar gets a gold trophy icon (only when STRICTLY ahead — no arbitrary tie-breakers). A "Winners:" line at the top summarises in plain English ("JEPQ wins Growth · KO wins Longevity · O overall 75/100"). Click any ticker name in the column header to open its Stock Modal. Killer "which one should I buy first?" decision tool when you're torn between candidates.

A self-rated number you attach to a journal entry that asks "how confident am I in this thesis right now?" One = "I'm guessing." Ten = "I would bet meaningfully on this." Conviction is most useful written down BEFORE the outcome is known, then reviewed later. Most investors find their high-conviction calls don't actually outperform their low-conviction ones — see the Conviction vs Outcome chart on the Journal page.

A scatter plot on the Journal page that pairs every journal entry that has BOTH a conviction (1–10) AND a price-anchored ticker against that ticker's % return between when the entry was written and today. X-axis = conviction, Y-axis = return-since-entry. The chart unlocks once you have 20 qualifying entries.

Above the chart we surface a Pearson correlation (r) — the single number that summarises whether high-conviction calls are actually outperforming. r ≈ 0 means your conviction isn't predictive (the most common case). r > +0.4 = strong evidence your gut is calibrated. r < −0.4 = your bold calls are underperforming, which is worth investigating before sizing up further.

What you paid for shares, including any commissions or fees. Critical for calculating capital gains/losses when you sell, and for computing Yield on Cost (YoC). DiviDrip tracks cost basis automatically as you log positions.

The fixed annual interest rate stamped on a bond, baby bond, or preferred share at issuance — expressed as a percentage of par value, NOT of the current market price. Example: a "7.75% Notes Due 2030" baby bond has a 7.75% coupon. At the standard $25 par value, that means $25 × 7.75% = $1.9375 per share per year, paid in equal quarterly installments of $0.484. The coupon NEVER changes once the security is issued (with the rare exception of "fixed-to-floating" preferreds that reset to a benchmark rate after a set call date). This is why DiviDrip overrides standard TTM dividend math for these assets — Massive sometimes reports the quarterly $0.484 payment, and the common-stock math would multiply by 4 quarters to get $1.94/yr (correct), but it would also compute the yield against the LIVE market price, not par. DiviDrip enforces: annual dividend = par × coupon, current yield = (par × coupon) ÷ live price × 100. See also: Par Value, Baby Bond, Preferred Shares, Fixed-Rate Asset.

CPI is the U.S. government's monthly measure of how much prices are changing for everyday stuff — groceries, rent, gas, healthcare, etc. When you hear "inflation is running at 3%", that 3% number is from the CPI report. DiviDrip uses CPI YoY directly in the Fisher equation for Real Yield: Real = (1 + Nominal Yield) / (1 + CPI YoY) − 1 — more accurate than the linear approximation (Nominal − CPI), especially at higher yields where the compounding effect matters. Core CPI is the same index but with food and energy stripped out — both categories are highly volatile (gas prices swing 30%+ in a year, grocery prices spike on droughts and tariffs), so Core CPI gives a steadier read on the underlying inflation trend without the monthly noise. The Federal Reserve watches Core CPI (and Core PCE) more closely than headline CPI when setting policy. "CPI protection" means an investment whose income or value tends to rise alongside CPI, so your real spending power doesn't shrink during inflation. Real estate is a classic example: landlords can raise rents during inflation, and property values typically follow inflation upward, which is why REITs are often described as having built-in CPI protection. Other CPI-protected vehicles include Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS), commodity-linked stocks, and businesses with strong pricing power. See also: Inflation Hedge, REIT.

A critical distinction on preferred shares that determines what happens if the issuer skips a dividend payment.

Cumulative preferred: if the company skips a quarterly dividend, the missed payment ACCRUES as a debt the company owes you. The issuer cannot legally resume paying ANY common dividend (or buy back common stock) until all skipped preferred dividends are caught up — including the missed ones. This is a strong protection for preferred holders. Investment-grade preferreds are usually cumulative.

Non-cumulative preferred: if the company skips a quarterly dividend, it's simply gone. The issuer has no obligation to ever make up the missed payment. Common in bank preferreds (regulators require it under Basel III rules — non-cumulative preferreds count as Tier 1 regulatory capital, cumulative ones do not). BHFAN (“5.375% Non-Cumulative Preferred Stock, Series C”) is a typical example.

The yield premium: non-cumulative preferreds usually pay a slightly higher coupon (0.25-0.75% extra) to compensate for the weaker holder protection. DiviDrip's Stock Modal flags non-cumulative preferreds with an extra warning sentence in the educational notice (“Skipped quarters are gone for good”) so you can size that risk before buying.

See also: Preferred Shares (Preferred Stock), Capital Stack, Fixed-Rate Asset.

The most recent trade price. During regular market hours (9:30 AM – 4:00 PM Eastern) this updates live with every new trade routed to the consolidated tape. Outside those hours it reflects the last regular-session close (DiviDrip shows the prior trading day's close, not extended-hours prices, on this row).

A liquidity check: Current Assets ÷ Current Liabilities. Above 1.5 generally means the company can comfortably cover its short-term bills. Below 1.0 is a yellow flag — they may struggle with near-term obligations.

Total debt divided by shareholder equity. Below 50% = financially conservative; 50–100% = moderate leverage; above 100% means the company has more debt than equity, which is riskier but normal in capital-intensive industries (utilities, telecom, REITs).

Provides publicly accessible aggregated volume by security for off-exchange short-sale trades executed during normal market hours. Reported every day by FINRA (the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority — Wall Street's self-regulator). The DiviDrip Stock Modal's Insights tab surfaces three numbers from this feed: Short Vol (raw shares sold short that day), Total Vol (the day's total trading volume across all venues), and Ratio = short ÷ total. A ratio above 50% paints the row red — it means more than half of the day's trading was new short selling, often a sign of heavy bearish positioning. Note: this is DAILY off-exchange short volume, NOT to be confused with Short Interest (the cumulative open short position reported twice a month by exchanges). See also: Short Ratio, FINRA.

The long-run US Equity Risk Premium (ERP) of roughly 4.5 percentage points computed by Aswath Damodaran — NYU Stern professor and the widely-cited authority on valuation — from 96 years of US market data (1928–2023). Damodaran publishes the full historical ERP dataset annually on his NYU Stern site; DiviDrip scrapes the geometric-mean real-return series live so the number stays current.

What ERP actually means: the extra annual return, in real (inflation-adjusted) percentage points, that stock investors historically earned ABOVE the risk-free rate (10-Year US Treasury) for taking on equity risk. Across 1928–2023 that premium averaged ~4.5pp. Not 4.5% relative; 4.5 pp ARITHMETICALLY above whatever the Treasury paid in real terms.

Where you see it in DiviDrip: the Valuation Matrix card on every Insights tab shows a small chip comparing YOUR current required real return to Damodaran's ~4.5pp baseline. The card also renders a one-tap recommender pill — clicking “⇢ set X.X%” snaps the required-return slider to the nominal value that lands your risk premium at exactly 4.5pp over today's Fisher-adjusted real 10Y Treasury yield.

How to read the chip:

• Balanced (within ±1.5pp of 4.5pp) — your DCF assumptions roughly match a century of US equity history. Most dividend and quality-growth names will pass or fail on business fundamentals rather than on an over-tuned discount rate.
• Soft (more than 1.5pp BELOW the baseline) — you're valuing stocks with more optimism than history supports. The margin of safety is thin; small business hiccups can drag the position underwater fast. Using less than the 4.5pp baseline is fine if you're a Buffett-style long-term holder with high conviction, but understand you're accepting a return that's historically been available almost risk-free.
• Aggressive (more than 1.5pp ABOVE the baseline) — you're demanding a higher premium than equities have historically delivered. Very few quality names will screen as undervalued at this bar — great for a highly-selective deep-value posture, but you'll miss most compounders.

Why we anchor to REAL, not nominal: the 4.5pp figure is a real (inflation-adjusted) premium. To turn it into a nominal required return usable by the DCF, DiviDrip runs the reverse-Fisher: nominal = (1 + [real_rf + 4.5pp]) × (1 + CPI YoY) − 1. The recommender snaps that result to the nearest 0.5% step and clamps to the slider's 6–15% range.

Caveats: the historical ERP is a rear-view mirror. Some analysts (Damodaran himself) publish an implied forward ERP that varies year-to-year based on current market prices; DiviDrip uses the long-run historical figure as a stable anchor. If you're valuing high-growth international names or sectors with much higher perceived risk (biotech, frontier markets), a premium of 6–7pp is more defensible.

See also: Required Rate of Return, Intrinsic Value (Target Buy Price), Fisher Equation, Real Yield, DDM.

The low and high prices the stock has traded at so far during today's session. A wide day range usually signals high volatility or news flow; a narrow range signals quiet, low-conviction trading. Compare to the 52-week range to see whether today's action is unusual.

Buying a fixed dollar amount on a regular schedule (usually monthly) regardless of share price. Reduces timing risk — when prices are low your money buys more shares; when prices are high it buys fewer. Over long periods DCA smooths out entry-point volatility versus trying to time the market with lump-sum buys. In the What If? simulator, the DCA card lets you model a monthly $ amount spread EACH across selected tickers or SPLIT among them, then projects the compounding effect of those extra shares over the Time Machine horizon.

A valuation framework that says a stock is worth the present value of every future dividend it will ever pay you, discounted back to today using your required rate of return. We pick the right DDM variant based on what the asset actually is: Zero-Growth Perpetuity for preferred shares and baby bonds (the coupon never changes), Gordon Constant Growth for steady raisers like KO/JNJ/PG with a 5-yr CAGR ≤ 6%, and Two-Stage DDM for fast-growing dividend payers (5-yr CAGR > 6%). DDM is the right tool for stable dividend businesses — it is the wrong tool for BDCs, CEFs, and Mortgage REITs (whose distributions blend recurring income with one-time capital gains), so the Insights tab card surfaces a "DDM bypassed" notice for those asset classes instead of a fake intrinsic value. See also: Gordon Constant Growth Model, Two-Stage DDM, Zero-Growth Perpetuity, Required Rate of Return, Intrinsic Value.

The day a company's board officially announces an upcoming dividend payment, including the amount, ex-dividend date, record date, and pay date.

The gap in total return between your portfolio and a benchmark (SCHD or VYM) over the same window. Shown as "percentage points" (pp). Example: if your portfolio returned 42% and SCHD returned 37% over the same 5 years, your delta vs SCHD is +5pp — you beat SCHD by 5 percentage points. Positive delta = beating the benchmark (green). Negative delta = trailing the benchmark (rose). Under 1pp is basically tied; 1–3pp is slight; 3–7pp is solid; 7–15pp is a clear win or painful miss; 15pp+ is a blowout in either direction.

Two unrelated meanings — same English phrase, completely different securities. Sense A (foreign ADR): an American Depositary Share, i.e. the underlying foreign-company share that an ADR receipt represents — see ADS. Sense B (fractional preferred): a U.S. company's fractional ownership — usually 1/1,000th — of a single underlying preferred share with a very high par value (typically $25,000 or more). Issuers do this because institutional bond markets prefer high-par instruments, but retail investors want shares priced affordably. So a $25,000 par "5.375% Series C Preferred Stock" gets wrapped into 1,000 depositary shares of $25 par each, sold under a ticker like BHFAN or FRMEP. The math is identical to a regular $25-par preferred — your $25 buys 1/1,000th of the underlying preferred and entitles you to 1/1,000th of its dividend (e.g. $25,000 × 5.375% ÷ 1,000 = $1.34375/yr per depositary share, paid quarterly as $0.336). DiviDrip's Massive-API-overridden math handles Sense-B depositary shares correctly: it parses the coupon from the security name, multiplies by the effective $25 par, and ignores the misleading "par" field that sometimes reports the underlying $25,000. Sense-B shares are NOT ADRs — they have no Foreign Withholding Tax and don't get a country-flag badge. See also: ADS, ADR, Preferred Shares, Coupon Rate, Par Value, Fixed-Rate Asset.

Financial contracts whose value is "derived" from the price of something else — a stock, a bond, an index, a commodity, an interest rate, or a currency. The contract itself is just an agreement; the underlying asset is what actually moves the price. The four main types are options (right but not obligation to buy/sell at a set price), futures (binding agreement to buy/sell at a set future date and price), swaps (exchange one stream of payments for another, like fixed interest for floating), and forwards (private futures-like agreements). Funds use derivatives for two very different reasons: speculation (amplifying returns with leverage — the source of the danger) and hedging (offsetting an existing risk — the source of the safety). When a fund prospectus says "derivatives are used only to hedge", as JBBB does, it means the fund is buying protection rather than placing bets. See also: Hedge, Leveraged ETF, Futures-Based Fund.

A 0–100 score DiviDrip computes for each opted-in community member based on the spread of their portfolio across BOTH sectors AND asset types. Higher = more diversified. Uses an inverted Herfindahl-Hirschman index — a single sector or asset type = 0; perfectly even spread = 100. Weighted 60% sector / 40% type. Yield is NEVER part of the score — we deliberately do not reward yield chasing. Drives the DiviDrip Community Leaderboard.

A cash (or sometimes stock) payment that a company sends to shareholders out of its profits. The whole reason this app exists. Dividends can be raised, held flat, or cut — DiviDrip helps you spot the warning signs early.

A DiviDrip view (logged-in users) that shows every upcoming ex-dividend and payment date for stocks in your watchlist and portfolio, laid out month-by-month so you can plan around the income stream.

When a company reduces its dividend payout vs the prior payment. Usually a major red flag — and a falling stock price often follows the announcement. Many cuts are telegraphed by warning signs the app surfaces: payout ratio above 100%, falling earnings, rising debt. DiviDrip flags a recent cut with a rose-coloured "CUT -X.X%" badge next to the ticker (visible on the Stock Modal, Portfolio rows, Watchlist, Screener, and the main stock table). The badge appears whenever the LAST declared dividend dropped 10% or more vs the prior payment. Only the MOST RECENT change is shown — if a stock cuts then later raises, the cut badge is replaced by a raise badge automatically. Hover the badge to see the exact $ amounts of the last and prior payments.

Free Cash Flow ÷ Cash Dividends Paid (in absolute terms). The single sharpest dividend-safety metric on this tab and arguably the most important number on any dividend stock's financials. Above 1.5 = comfortable cushion (the dividend takes < 67% of FCF); 1.0–1.5 = adequate but watch closely; below 1.0 means the dividend is being topped up from debt, asset sales, or the cash pile, which is unsustainable long-term. CRITICALLY different from the EPS Payout Ratio (Dividends ÷ Net Income), which uses accounting earnings rather than cash. A company can show 65% payout ratio while burning cash if it has heavy non-cash earnings (paper gains, write-ups). FCF coverage cuts through that — it uses ACTUAL cash. Caveat: capital-heavy REITs, MLPs, and utilities often show suspiciously low or negative FCF coverage because they reinvest aggressively in growth capex; for those, check the REIT Cash Lens (FFO coverage) instead. See also: Free Cash Flow, Capex (Capital Expenditures), Cash from Operations (CFO), Payout Ratio.

How often a stock pays a dividend. The five frequencies you'll see in DiviDrip: Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly (the most common for U.S. stocks), Semi-Annually (typical for European stocks), and Annually. Monthly payers are popular with retirees because the income matches monthly bills; weekly payers are very rare and usually leveraged options-income ETFs.

The CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of a stock's dividend over a chosen period (1, 3, 5, or 10 years). A 5-year DGR of 7% means the dividend has grown 7% per year on average — a strong indicator of a healthy, well-managed company.

The dollar difference between a stock's forward dividend rate (the next annualised dividend the company has signalled it will pay) and its trailing 12-month dividend rate (what it actually paid over the prior year). Both are USD-normalised so cross-market comparisons work. A POSITIVE delta means the company's most recent declared rate is higher than what it actually paid over the last 12 months — a leading indicator of a fresh dividend hike. A NEGATIVE delta is the opposite — a leading indicator of a cut, often appearing in the data BEFORE the formal cut announcement is widely reported. DiviDrip surfaces this two ways: (1) the Quality Score awards +3 for hikes ≥5% (forward/trailing) or deducts 5 for cuts ≤−10%; (2) the Stock Modal's Dividend Info tab shows a green "Recent Hike +X%" or red "Recent Cut −Y%" banner whenever the change is at least 2% in either direction. Example: KO trailing $1.84/yr, forward $1.94/yr → delta +$0.10 (+5.4%) — bullish dividend momentum.

A 0–100 composite score DiviDrip computes for every dividend stock from cached fundamentals — no third-party API. Five pillars: Safety (30 pts, payout ratio with REIT-aware cap), Yield (25 pts, sweet-spot 3–7% rewarded, traps >12% zeroed), Growth (20 pts, 5-year dividend CAGR), Longevity (25 pts, King 25 / Aristocrat 20 / Achiever 10), and Fundamentals (up to +13 pts, FinImpulse-derived: +5 for ROE ≥15%, +5 for stable revenue (revenue stability ≤0.05), +3 for a recent dividend hike of ≥5% forward vs trailing). Structural penalties: −15 leveraged ETF, −5 CEF, −5 Debt/Equity >2.0, −5 recent dividend cut (forward ≤−10% vs trailing). Bands: 85+ Elite (A+), 70+ Strong (A), 55+ Healthy (B), 40+ Average (C), 25+ Weak (D), under 25 Risky (F). Read it ALONGSIDE the Income Risk Score — quality answers "how attractive is this dividend profile?" while risk answers "how shaky is this paycheck?". Click any quality badge to open the full Quality Breakdown popover with bar charts, fundamental bonuses, and structural penalties listed individually; on Watchlist rows you also get a Compare Quality button to stack up to 6 tickers side-by-side.

When a company increases its dividend payout vs the prior payment. A positive signal for income growth — companies that consistently raise tend to outperform those that don't over long periods (Dividend Aristocrats and Kings are the classic examples). DiviDrip flags a recent raise with an emerald-coloured "+X.X% RAISE" badge next to the ticker (visible on the Stock Modal, Portfolio rows, Watchlist, Screener, and the main stock table). The badge appears whenever the LAST declared dividend rose 10% or more vs the prior payment. Only the MOST RECENT change is shown — a fresh raise overwrites a previous cut or raise badge automatically. Hover the badge to see the exact $ amounts of the last and prior payments.

A bonus visual on top of the regular Dividend Raise badge. When a King (50+ years), Aristocrat (25+ years), or Achiever (10+ years) is the one declaring the raise, the green "+X.X% RAISE" pill swaps to an amber pill with a flame icon and a "Streak!" suffix — celebrating that the multi-decade raise streak is still alive after the latest hike. Why it matters: the longer the streak, the more meaningful each new raise is. A 50-year King raising again is a much stronger signal than a first-year payer raising — it tells you the board still has the discipline (and the cash flow) to extend an unbroken record that very few companies in the world maintain. The flame appears on the Stock Modal, Portfolio rows, Watchlist, Screener, and the main stock table — anywhere the standard raise badge shows up. It only appears for raises (not cuts) and only for the three highest dividend tiers; everything else uses the standard emerald raise pill.

DiviDrip's shorthand for how long a stock has consecutively raised its dividend. Kings = 50+ years (the most elite), Aristocrats = 25+ years, Achievers = 10+ years. Each tier has its own Challenge page where you can track which names you own.

A stock whose dividend keeps going up while the business behind it is not. DiviDrip flags a Dividend Trap on the Triangle tab whenever (a) the dividend is growing AND earnings are shrinking, (b) the dividend is growing AND revenue is shrinking with flat EPS, or (c) the dividend is growing more than twice as fast as EPS (plus a small buffer). When the trap flag fires the radar fill turns rose and a warning banner explains which leg is mismatched. Classic trap signature: a high-yield stock with a multi-year dividend streak whose earnings are declining year over year — eventually the payout ratio hits 100% and the dividend gets cut.

A 3-axis radar chart that compares the 5-year compound growth rates of three numbers that have to move in the same direction for a dividend to actually be sustainable: Revenue (top-line sales), EPS (diluted earnings per share), and the Dividend itself. Open the Triangle tab on any stock modal — or visit /triangle/TICKER directly to share the view — and the chart fills emerald when all three legs are healthy, amber when the picture is mixed, and rose when the dividend is racing ahead of the fundamentals underneath it. Window is adaptive: if a company only has 3 years of public history, the chart says "n=3yr CAGR" instead of blanking out.

Annualized dividend ÷ current share price, expressed as a percentage. A stock paying $4 per share annually at a $100 price has a 4% yield. Yield rises automatically when the price falls — which is why a sky-high yield can be a warning sign rather than a good deal (see Yield Trap).

Automatically reinvesting your dividends back into more shares of the same stock instead of taking the cash. Over decades this compounding effect dramatically increases your share count and total income. Most U.S. brokerages offer DRIP for free, often even fractional shares. DiviDrip's DRIP Calculator models this for you.

A built-in DiviDrip tool that projects how a position will grow over time when dividends are reinvested. Plug in shares + assumed dividend growth + price growth, and it shows year-by-year share count, dividend income, and account value.

Operating profit BEFORE the four big non-operational charges: interest expense (a financing decision), taxes (a jurisdiction decision), and depreciation + amortization (non-cash accounting charges spread over the useful life of past investments). The result is a rough proxy for the cash operating earnings of the business, useful for comparing companies with very different debt loads, tax structures, or capital intensity. Most commonly seen as the denominator in the EV/EBITDA multiple. Critics rightly point out that EBITDA is NOT cash flow — it ignores working-capital changes, real reinvestment needs (capex), and the eventual cash cost of replacing depreciated assets. Charlie Munger famously called it "bullshit earnings" because companies use it to flatter results. Use EBITDA as one signal among many; never confuse it with Free Cash Flow.

A more complete valuation than market cap: market cap + total debt − cash on hand. Represents what it would cost to buy the entire company outright. Used in metrics like EV/EBITDA.

Total company profit divided by shares outstanding. The headline number every quarter. EPS Growth (also called CAGR over multiple years) is one of the strongest predictors of long-term dividend growth.

Compound Annual Growth Rate of Earnings Per Share — usually measured over 3 or 5 years. Example: a stock that went from $2.00 EPS five years ago to $3.50 today has an EPS CAGR of about 11.8% per year. EPS Growth is the cleanest signal that a company can KEEP raising its dividend over time — you cannot pay rising dividends out of falling earnings forever. Above 8%/yr is excellent (think tech, healthcare leaders); 4–8% is solid (consumer staples, mature industrials); 0–4% is slow but acceptable for high-payout names like utilities; negative means earnings are shrinking and the dividend is at risk. Surfaced in the Stock Modal's Profitability section once Massive financials have populated the field.

A framework for judging companies on three non-financial dimensions: Environmental (carbon emissions, water and energy use, pollution, climate-change exposure), Social (employee treatment, workplace safety, community impact, product safety, supply-chain ethics), and Governance (board independence, executive pay, shareholder rights, accounting transparency, anti-corruption practices). ESG funds use this framework to either screen OUT companies that fail certain thresholds (the most common approach) or actively tilt TOWARD companies with strong ESG profiles. When a fund like JLQD says holdings are sold once they "no longer meet the fund's ESG and/or sustainable criteria", it means a company crossed a line on one of these three dimensions — pollution incident, accounting scandal, governance scandal, etc. — and the fund's rules force divestment. ESG ratings are not standardized: different agencies (MSCI, Sustainalytics, S&P) can give the same company very different scores depending on which factors they weight.

Enterprise Value ÷ EBITDA. The "acquirer's multiple" — what an acquirer would effectively pay (market cap + debt − cash) for every dollar of unlevered cash operating earnings. Industry-agnostic in a way P/E is not, because it neutralises both capital structure and tax regime. Useful for comparing a U.S. company against a European or Asian one, or a debt-heavy utility against a debt-light tech company. Rough rules of thumb: below 8 = cheap for most industries; 8–15 = fair; above 18 = priced for growth or a premium franchise. Investment bankers use EV/EBITDA more than P/E because it strips out distortions from the deal structure. See also: Enterprise Value, EBITDA.

A sky-blue "Ex-div in Xd" / "Ex-div today" / "Ex-div tomorrow" chip that fires on Watchlist rows when the stock's next ex-dividend date is within the next 7 days. Buy BEFORE the ex-div date to qualify for the upcoming dividend. The chip also appears in the Watchlist Snapshot card at the top of the page so you can see all your soon-paying tickers at a glance. See "Ex-Dividend Date" for the underlying mechanic.

The cutoff day to qualify for the next dividend. If you own the stock before the ex-div date, you get the dividend. If you buy on or after the ex-div date, you do not — the previous owner does. Under the U.S. T+1 settlement rule (effective May 28, 2024), the ex-dividend date is the SAME day as the record date — there's no longer a 1-day gap between them. The stock price typically drops by roughly the dividend amount on this day, which is why "buying for the dividend" the day before ex-div doesn't magically free-money the payment — you're paying for it via the price drop the next morning.

The annual fee an ETF or mutual fund charges, expressed as a percentage of assets — quietly subtracted from the fund's daily NAV, so you never see a bill but the cost is very real over time. A 0.06% expense ratio (like SCHD) means $6/year per $10,000 invested; a 0.68% ratio (like IWMI) means $68/year per $10,000. Index ETFs typically sit between 0.03% and 0.20%; actively-managed and options-overlay funds (JEPI, JEPQ, covered-call ETFs, derivative-income funds) run 0.30%–0.95%; leveraged or futures-based funds can exceed 1%. Lower is almost always better for buy-and-hold investors because the fee compounds against you — a 0.6% difference over 30 years can eat ~15–20% of your final balance. Surfaced in the Stock Modal's Stock Metrics → Fund Profile section for every ETF we have data on.

The actual cash a company generates after paying for its operations and capital investments. Unlike "earnings" (which involves accounting choices), free cash flow is hard to fake and is the truest measure of a dividend's sustainability. If FCF comfortably covers the dividend, the dividend is safe.

Free Cash Flow ÷ Revenue, as a percentage. Higher is better. Above 15% is excellent (think software, payments). Below 5% is thin and dividend-vulnerable in a downturn. Negative means the company is burning cash.

The cash a company generates AFTER paying for capital expenditures and AFTER servicing debt — the cash that legally belongs to equity holders and could be paid out as dividends or buybacks. Formula: Operating Cash Flow − Capex + Net Borrowing. Different from regular Free Cash Flow (which doesn't account for the debt slice) — FCFE is the correct input for any valuation model that prices the equity side of the capital structure specifically. Used in DiviDrip's Two-Stage FCFE valuation model on the Capital Analytics tab and the Insights tab's Valuation Matrix for non-dividend stocks. See also: Two-Stage FCFE Valuation, Free Cash Flow, Owner Earnings Multiplier, Cash from Operations (CFO).

Pronounced "F-F-O" (each letter). The REIT industry's standard earnings measure, built to undo a quirk in GAAP accounting: GAAP forces REITs to subtract depreciation on their buildings every year, even though real-world property values usually rise. FFO "adds back" that non-cash depreciation to net income, plus removes one-time gains/losses on property sales — giving a cleaner picture of the recurring cash earnings the REIT generates. Almost every REIT reports FFO alongside GAAP net income; when a REIT says its "payout ratio is 75% of FFO", that is the number to trust, not payout-of-GAAP-earnings (which for a REIT can easily look like 200%+ and trigger false alarms). DiviDrip's REIT Cash Lens panel on the Stock Modal shows your FFO per share, the FFO payout ratio, and a verdict (Very Safe < 70% / Sweet Spot 70-85% / Stretched 85-100% / Risky > 100%) so you can sanity-check a REIT's dividend coverage at a glance. See also: AFFO (even better), GAAP, NOI, REIT Cash Lens, REIT.

A cost-basis method that sells your OLDEST tax lots first. The IRS legal default if you don't specify otherwise — and the only method Robinhood supports (no override allowed). Pros: oldest shares are the most likely to qualify for long-term capital-gains rates. Cons: in a heavily appreciated stock the oldest shares usually carry the lowest cost basis, producing the biggest taxable gain. DiviDrip's Multi-Share Sell widget pre-checks FIFO for exactly these reasons. See also: LIFO, HIFO, Tax Lot Optimizer, Cost Basis.

A non-government self-regulatory organisation (SRO) that oversees U.S. broker-dealers and the OTC market under SEC authority. FINRA writes the rulebook for how brokers must treat clients, runs the BrokerCheck disclosure system, and publishes the Daily Short Sale Volume feed DiviDrip surfaces on the Insights tab. Created in 2007 by merging the NASD and NYSE's member regulation arm. Distinct from the SEC (the federal regulator) — FINRA enforces day-to-day broker conduct; the SEC sets the big-picture securities laws. See also: Daily Short Sale Volume (FINRA), SEC.

The mathematically exact way to translate a nominal rate of return into a real (inflation-adjusted) one. Named after Irving Fisher, the American economist who formalised it in The Theory of Interest (1930). The formula is Real = (1 + Nominal) ÷ (1 + Inflation) − 1.

Why not just subtract? Most tools use the linear approximation Real ≈ Nominal − Inflation. That's close enough when both rates are small (say 2% nominal and 1% inflation), but the error grows fast as either rate rises. At 11% nominal with 4% inflation — a common BDC or covered-call ETF scenario — linear says +7.00% real, but Fisher gives +6.73%. That 0.27pp gap compounds meaningfully over a long-held position.

Worked example: at a nominal 4.2% dividend yield and 3.1% CPI YoY:

• Linear approximation: 4.20% − 3.10% = +1.10% real
• Fisher-exact: (1.042 ÷ 1.031) − 1 = +1.067% real

Where DiviDrip uses it: everywhere you see a Real Yield number — the Nominal/Real switch above every stock table (Screener, Watchlist, Portfolio, Rebalancer), the “+X.XX% real” subline under the Stock Modal's Dividend Info yield chip, the Portfolio Contrast card, the Portfolio Blend vs Ticker comparison card, the Portfolio Summary's Portfolio Yield and Yield on Cost tiles, the Macro Yield Strip's Real Yield pill, and the Portfolio Health Score badge's Real Yield sub-score. One canonical implementation lives at src/lib/realYield.js so every consumer stays in sync.

The Real vs Nominal Yield toggle above every stock table uses the Fisher equation under the hood — flipping the pill re-runs the calculation with the current CPI YoY (read live from the Macro Fed Economy cache) and re-renders the column.

The related compound-inflation identity DiviDrip also uses for DRIP present-value math: FV = PV × (1 + inflation)years. Same underlying idea (rates compound multiplicatively, not additively) applied to multi-year projections instead of a single-year yield comparison. The DRIP calculators and the 12-Month Income Heatmap use this form to translate future dividend dollars into today's purchasing power.

See also: Real Yield, Nominal Yield, Real vs Nominal Yield toggle, CPI (Consumer Price Index) / CPI Protection.

DiviDrip's umbrella term for any income security whose distribution is locked in at issuance as a fixed coupon on a par value — instead of being declared quarterly by a board out of variable earnings. The three big families: Baby Bonds (exchange-traded corporate debt), Preferred Shares (equity that sits above common in the capital stack), and Preferred Units (the MLP / partnership cousin of preferred shares).

Why DiviDrip tags them: traditional dividend-screener math assumes you take the trailing 12-month payouts and multiply by the live share price to get the yield. That works fine for common stocks, where the board can raise or cut the dividend each quarter. But on a fixed-rate asset, the coupon is mathematically locked: a “7.75% Notes Due 2030” pays $25 × 7.75% = $1.9375/yr forever, regardless of where the market price drifts. If the market price falls to $20, the yield rises (it's now $1.9375 / $20 = 9.7%), but the dollar payment doesn't change. Without the override, common-stock math can wildly inflate the apparent annual rate when only one or two quarters of TTM data exist.

How DiviDrip handles them:

• Backend service services/baby_bonds.py parses the security name with regex (e.g. “X.YZ% Notes Due YYYY”, “X.YZ% Non-Cumulative Preferred Stock”, “X.YZ% Series A Preferred Units”) and extracts coupon rate + maturity.
• Stamps the cache row with asset_class = baby_bond / preferred_share / preferred_unit, plus par value and coupon rate.
• At runtime, the override forces dividend_rate = par × coupon and dividend_yield = (par × coupon) ÷ live_price × 100. Payout ratio is set to null (debt instruments and preferreds don't have a meaningful payout ratio).
• Triangle “Dividend Trap” verdicts are suppressed on these assets — growth-trap math is calibrated for common stocks, and a fixed coupon by definition can't be a yield trap caused by accelerating dividends.
• The Stock Modal renders an amber educational notice card explaining the asset class, par, coupon, and call risk — adapted per class (bond = maturity emphasis; preferred = cumulative-vs-non-cumulative + perpetual).

See also: Baby Bond, Preferred Shares, Preferred Units, Par Value, Coupon Rate, Capital Stack, Call Risk (Callable / Call Date).

The number of a company's shares that are actually available for the public to trade — total shares minus those held by insiders, founders, and large institutional locks. Low float can mean wild price swings on small volume.

The IRS mechanism that lets U.S. taxpayers recover Foreign Withholding Tax paid on ADR dividends, dollar-for-dollar against their U.S. tax bill, by filing Form 1116 with their federal return. Key rule: the FTC only works in a TAXABLE brokerage account — foreign tax withheld inside a Roth IRA, Traditional IRA, 401(k), HSA, or SEP/SIMPLE IRA is permanently forfeited because there's no U.S. tax owed on the dividends to credit against. This is why the Stock Modal's "Compare across your accounts" pill splits your ADR position by account type and shows which lots recover the foreign tax (taxable) vs which forfeit it (retirement). If you hold an ADR position split across multiple accounts and some lots are untagged, the modal nudges you to tag them with the clickable Broker / Account-Type pills inside the My Portfolio tab. Form 1116 is a single-page IRS form; most tax software (TurboTax, FreeTaxUSA) walks you through it automatically when 1099-DIV box 7 reports foreign tax paid. There's also a simpler de minimis exception (no Form 1116 needed) when total foreign tax paid is under $300 single / $600 joint. See also: ADR, ADR Tax Drag, Foreign Withholding Tax (WHT), Tax Treaty Rate, Brokerage Account (Taxable), Roth IRA, IRA (Traditional).

The tax that a foreign government withholds at source on dividends paid by foreign companies before the cash ever reaches your U.S. brokerage account. Rates vary by country and bilateral tax treaty — UK 0%, Japan 10%, China 10%, France 12.8%, Germany 26.375%, Switzerland 35%, Brazil 15%, Kazakhstan 15%, etc. (sourced from IRS Pub 901, U.S. portfolio-investor treaty rates). DiviDrip's Stock Modal Insights tab shows a per-share withholding estimator card on every ADR with a known country code, and the Portfolio dashboard surfaces an aggregate "ADR Tax Drag" banner summing the withheld dollars across all your ADR holdings. The withheld tax is NOT lost forever if you hold the ADR in a taxable brokerage account — you can claim it back via the Foreign Tax Credit on Form 1116. It IS effectively lost if held inside a Roth IRA or other tax-advantaged account, because there's no U.S. tax owed on the dividends to credit against. See also: ADR, ADR Tax Drag, Foreign Tax Credit (FTC) / Form 1116, Tax Treaty Rate.

Same as Annualized Dividend — the expected total dividend per share over the next 12 months. Compare against the Trailing Annual Dividend Rate to spot recent dividend hikes (forward > trailing) or cuts (forward < trailing) — see "Dividend Policy Delta".

Price-to-Earnings ratio based on next year's expected earnings rather than the past year's actual earnings. Useful when a company is rapidly growing or recovering, since trailing P/E may overstate how "expensive" the stock really is.

A composite indicator on the Stock Metrics tab that combines four non-dividend valuation lenses into a single verdict: (1) Multiples cheapness via PEG bucket — where PEG comes from the vendor, or a fallback (PEG (rev) = P/E ÷ revenue-growth-%, or P/S/g = P/S ÷ revenue-growth-%) when analyst PEG is not published; (2) Rule of 40 — trailing revenue growth plus profit margin, on either the operating or FCF basis; (3) FCF margin quality — free cash flow as a percentage of revenue; (4) Altman Z-Score balance-sheet health — safe / grey / distress zone. Each sub-signal scores -1 / 0 / +1 and the four scores sum to a composite in the range [-4, +4]. Composite ≥ +2 renders as an emerald "Compounder — cheap for the growth" pill; -1 to +1 as an amber "Fair for the growth" pill; ≤ -2 as a rose "Rich or risky for the growth" pill. The four coloured letters on the right (PEG / R40 / FCF / ALT) show which specific sub-signal is pulling in which direction — a reader can see the framework consensus at a glance without opening the Capital Analytics or Insights tabs. The ribbon self-hides when fewer than three sub-signals are available, avoiding misleading verdicts from partial data.

A pooled investment vehicle — many investors' money is bundled together so a professional manager (or an automated index rule set) can buy a basket of dozens or hundreds of holdings on everyone's behalf. You buy shares of the fund, the fund owns the actual stocks/bonds/CLOs/etc. The most common types you'll see in DiviDrip: ETFs (Exchange-Traded Funds — trade like stocks all day at the market price; the bulk of dividend products like SCHD, JEPI, JAAA), Mutual Funds (priced once a day at NAV; older format, usually held inside 401(k)s), CEFs (Closed-End Funds — fixed share count that trades at a premium or discount to NAV — see CEF entry), BDCs (Business Development Companies — see BDC entry), and REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts — technically a fund-like structure for real estate — see REIT entry). Funds give you instant diversification and (for index funds) low fees, in exchange for the management fee (the "expense ratio"). See also: BDC, CEF, REIT, ETF concepts in Stock Screener.

Morningstar's standardised classification for the fund — e.g. "Large Blend", "Mid Growth", "High Yield Bond", "Real Estate". Used for peer comparisons. Only compare expense ratios and returns within the same category; comparing a small-cap value ETF to a large-cap growth ETF tells you nothing.

The sponsoring asset manager — Vanguard, BlackRock (iShares), JPMorgan, Schwab, State Street (SPDR), Invesco, etc. Different families have different reputations for cost (Vanguard, Schwab), product breadth (iShares), or active-management quality (JPMorgan, Fidelity). The sponsor doesn't guarantee performance but affects fee structure and product longevity.

The fifth pillar of the Dividend Quality Score (worth up to +13 pts net). Unlike the four core pillars (Safety / Yield / Growth / Longevity), this one is purely additive — it can boost a score but only fires when the underlying FinImpulse-derived field is on file. The five components: (1) Stable Revenue (+5) when revenue stability ≤ 0.05 (low coefficient of variation in 5-yr revenue), (2) Strong ROE (+5) when Return on Equity ≥ 15%, (3) Recent Hike (+3) when forward dividend is ≥5% above trailing 12-month rate, (4) High Debt (−5) when Debt/Equity > 2.0, (5) Recent Cut (−5) when forward dividend is ≤−10% vs trailing. The Stock Modal Quality Breakdown popover lists every firing factor with its raw value so you can see exactly what pushed the score up or down. See also: ROE, Revenue Stability, Debt-to-Equity, Dividend Policy Delta.

An ETF that gets its exposure to commodities, currencies, or volatility through futures contracts rather than owning the underlying assets. Comes with margin/leverage risk, "roll cost" decay (futures contracts must be replaced as they expire), and returns can drift away from the underlying over time. Tagged with an amber "Futures" badge in DiviDrip.

Shorthand for the dollar change in value of an investment compared to what you paid for it: G/L = Current Value − Cost Basis. A positive G/L means you're ahead, negative means you're behind. DiviDrip surfaces G/L in three flavors:

Unrealized G/L — the gain or loss exists on paper because the stock price moved, but you haven't sold yet. Doesn't count for taxes (yet). This is what you see on the Tax Lot Optimizer page and in the Portfolio summary. Until you sell, the number can swing freely with the market.

Realized G/L — the gain or loss locked in when you actually sold. Now it counts for taxes (capital-gains rules apply, with long-term vs short-term treatment based on how long you held the lot before selling). Once realized, the number doesn't change.

G/L % — the same gain or loss expressed as a percentage of cost basis: G/L % = (Current Value − Cost Basis) / Cost Basis × 100. Lets you compare positions of different sizes — a $500 gain on a $1,000 buy (+50%) is a much bigger win than a $500 gain on a $50,000 buy (+1%) even though the dollar amounts are the same. DiviDrip color-codes G/L green when positive and rose-red when negative.

Note: G/L on a dividend stock with DRIP on usually understates total return because cash dividends received and reinvested don't change cost basis or current value the way price moves do. Total return (G/L + cash dividends taken + DRIP-reinvested dividends) is the more complete picture — see the Time Machine bar on every watchlist row for a 1-year total-return view that includes DRIP.

Pronounced "gap". The standard bookkeeping rulebook that every U.S. public company must follow when reporting earnings, assets, and liabilities to the SEC. When you see "net income", "EPS" (earnings per share), or "payout ratio" on a regular stock, those numbers are GAAP-based. The strength of GAAP is that it makes companies comparable — same rules across every industry. The weakness is that some industries don't fit neatly into GAAP's one-size-fits-all mold. REITs are the classic example: GAAP forces them to subtract depreciation on their real estate every year, which is a non-cash accounting charge that often dramatically understates how much money a REIT is actually making. That is why the REIT industry reports FFO and AFFO alongside GAAP — those custom metrics add the depreciation back to show the real cash earnings available for dividends. See also: AFFO, FFO, Payout Ratio, REIT.

The premium an acquirer paid above the fair value of a target company's identifiable assets when buying it. Reported on the balance sheet as an intangible asset. Unlike most assets, goodwill is NEVER amortized — but if the acquisition under-performs, management must take a "goodwill impairment" write-down, which slams reported earnings (sometimes by billions). Companies with heavy goodwill (>30% of total assets) have usually grown by ACQUISITION rather than by building internally; the higher this ratio, the more value depends on those acquisitions panning out. AT&T's $200B+ goodwill write-down after its Time Warner / DirecTV deals failed is a textbook cautionary tale. For dividend investors, watch for goodwill growing as a percentage of assets — it often signals "growth-by-checkbook" rather than organic compounding. Tangible Book Value subtracts goodwill out to give a more conservative net-asset floor. See also: Tangible Book Value, Net Debt.

The simplest variant of the Dividend Discount Model (DDM). Assumes the company raises its dividend at one sustainable rate forever. The math: Price = D × (1 + g) / (r − g), where D is the current annual dividend, g is the constant growth rate, and r is your required rate of return. Works great for steady "Aristocrat" payers like KO, JNJ, and PG whose 5-yr CAGR is ≤ 6% and stable. Breaks for fast growers because mathematically no company can grow at 15-20%/yr indefinitely — when the 5-yr CAGR is > 6%, DiviDrip switches to the Two-Stage DDM instead. Named after Myron J. Gordon, the economist who derived the formula in 1956. See also: DDM, Two-Stage DDM, Required Rate of Return, Intrinsic Value.

Gross Profit ÷ Revenue. The percentage of every sales dollar left after the direct cost of producing the product or service (cost of goods sold). The first profitability metric on the income statement — before any operating expenses, interest, or taxes. Industries vary enormously: software companies routinely hit 70–85% gross margin (almost no marginal cost per copy sold); branded consumer staples 40–60%; supermarkets 25–30%; commodity refiners 5–15%. Always compare WITHIN an industry. A widening gross margin year-over-year is usually a sign of pricing power, scale, or moat; a contracting gross margin can mean rising input costs, intensifying competition, or product-mix shift. See also: Operating Margin, Net Margin, FCF Margin.

A company expected to grow earnings significantly faster than the market average. Growth stocks usually pay no or small dividends because they reinvest profits into expanding the business. Capital appreciation is the goal, not income.

Buying an investment specifically designed to offset losses on something else you own — financial insurance, basically. The whole point is to reduce risk, not to make money. Classic examples: a CLO fund buys interest-rate swaps so that if rates spike and bond prices crash, the swap payoff cancels out the bond losses; an airline buys oil futures so that if jet fuel prices double, the futures profit covers the higher fuel bill; a U.S. investor in European stocks buys currency forwards so that if the euro tanks, the FX hedge protects their dollar-denominated returns. When a fund prospectus says derivatives are used "only to hedge", as JBBB does, it means the fund is buying protection against existing risks in its portfolio — not making leveraged bets. Compare with speculation, where the same instruments are used for amplified returns. See also: Derivatives, Inflation Hedge.

A 2020 US law requiring every US-listed foreign company to submit to full PCAOB (Public Company Accounting Oversight Board) audit inspection or face mandatory delisting after three consecutive years of non-compliance. Passed in response to two decades of Chinese authorities blocking PCAOB inspectors from accessing audit working papers held on the mainland. The law specifically targeted Chinese ADRs (Alibaba, JD, Baidu, Pinduoduo, Bilibili) and briefly listed hundreds of Chinese companies as delisting candidates. An August 2022 agreement between the SEC, PCAOB, and Chinese regulators restored full inspection access to most Chinese ADRs, which pulled the major names off the immediate-delisting list. But the framework remains in force — any US-listed foreign company can be re-flagged if regulators lose inspection access again. For a US investor, the practical rule: check whether an international ADR you're considering is currently on the SEC HFCAA non-compliance list before buying; verify its auditor is on the current PCAOB inspection roster; and prefer names with a dual primary listing in Hong Kong or London as a fallback path if a future delisting cycle repeats.

A cost-basis method that sells your MOST EXPENSIVE tax lots first, ignoring the holding-period calendar entirely. This minimizes gains (or maximizes losses) for the current tax year — the go-to method when tax-loss harvesting. Watch out: HIFO can grab short-term lots and trigger ordinary-income rates on any gains it does realize. When two lots share an identical cost basis, DiviDrip breaks the tie oldest-first (mirroring FIFO). Available in the Multi-Share Sell widget on your Portfolio page. See also: FIFO, LIFO, Tax Lot Optimizer, Tax-Loss Harvest.

See "Backtest (Reverse Mode)" — a What If? simulator mode that replays real Yahoo monthly prices + dividends over the last N years, letting you validate DCA/DRIP against real market history instead of assumed growth rates.

The list of stocks, bonds, or other assets that an ETF or mutual fund actually owns. The "Top 10 Holdings" view is usually the most useful — those are the names driving most of the fund's performance. DiviDrip surfaces holdings data in the Stock Metrics tab for ETFs and CEFs.

A catch-all label for income instruments that don't cleanly fit the "bond OR stock" binary — they borrow features from both worlds. Preferred shares are the textbook example: legally they're equity (you own a slice of the company), but their fixed dividend behaves like a bond coupon, and they sit between debt and common stock in the capital stack. Other hybrids: convertible bonds (debt that can convert into common stock), trust-preferred securities (TruPS — preferreds issued by bank trust vehicles), and contingent convertibles ("CoCos" — bank preferreds that convert to common or get written down if the bank's capital ratio falls below a trigger). Hybrids appeal to issuers because they can count as equity for regulatory capital purposes (so banks love them under Basel III) while being tax-treated like debt in some cases (interest deductible). They appeal to investors because they pay higher yields than the issuer's plain bonds — to compensate for being further down the capital stack, having call risk, and (for non-cumulative preferreds) weaker payment protections. See also: Preferred Shares, Capital Stack, Baby Bond, Fixed-Rate Asset.

The year-by-year line chart on the What If? page that plots dividend income for both Now (your current portfolio as-is) and What If? (with your scenario applied) over the Time Machine horizon. Shows how changes + price/growth sliders diverge the two income paths over time.

See "Avg Risk (Income Reliability Score)" — DiviDrip's 1-to-10 rating of how dependable a stock's dividend is, based on payout ratio, dividend tier, yield level, and risk flags (leveraged, futures, BDC, CEF, etc.). 1-3 = Safe (emerald), 4-6 = Moderate (amber), 7-10 = Risky (rose).

An investment that tends to hold or grow its real value (purchasing power) when inflation rises. The idea: if a $20 dinner becomes $24 next year, an inflation hedge ideally rises by a similar amount so you're not poorer in real terms. Classic inflation hedges include real estate (rents and property values typically rise with prices), commodities like gold and oil, TIPS bonds (Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities), and stocks of companies with strong "pricing power" (think Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble — they can pass cost increases on to customers). REITs are often cited as a built-in inflation hedge because landlords can raise rents during inflation and property values track upward over time. No hedge is perfect — high inflation usually hurts most stocks short-term — but inflation-hedged assets tend to recover faster and protect long-term real returns better than cash or fixed-rate bonds. See also: CPI / CPI Protection, REIT.

Open-market BUYS and SELLS by company executives, directors, and 10% owners — required to be reported to the SEC within 2 business days on Form 4. Surfaced in the DiviDrip Stock Modal's Insider & Institutional tab as a chronological list with buyer/seller name, role (CEO / CFO / Director), shares, transaction type, and dollar value. The tab also surfaces 90-day and 12-month roll-ups so you can spot a cluster of insider buying (often a bullish signal — insiders are putting their own money in) vs scheduled sells (less informative because executives sell on 10b5-1 plans for tax/diversification reasons regardless of view). Always read the transaction code: P = open-market purchase (high-signal), S = open-market sale, M = option exercise, A = grant award. See also: Insider Ownership.

Percent of shares held by company executives, founders, and board members. High insider ownership is generally a positive — management has skin in the game and is incentivized to make decisions that benefit shareholders.

The largest professional investors holding the stock — pulled from the quarterly Form 13F filings every fund manager with $100M+ in assets must submit to the SEC within 45 days of quarter-end. The DiviDrip Stock Modal's Insider & Institutional tab shows the top 25 holders ranked by market value, with filer name (resolved live from SEC EDGAR), share count, dollar value, and a star icon flagging "famous" investors (Berkshire, Pershing Square, Renaissance, Bridgewater, etc.). Click any famous-investor name to drill into their full portfolio. See also: Smart-Money Crossover, Institutional Ownership.

Percent of shares held by professional money managers (mutual funds, pension funds, insurance companies). Very high institutional ownership can mean stability, but also amplified moves when those big players reposition.

What a stock is mathematically "worth" based on its future expected dividends and your required rate of return, calculated via the Dividend Discount Model (DDM). Surfaced as the Target Buy Price in the Insights tab's Valuation Matrix. IMPORTANT: intrinsic value is NOT a prediction of where the price will go. It is a dividend-only yardstick — if today's market price is well below the intrinsic value, the dividend stream alone justifies buying. If the market price is well above, the market is pricing in something DDM cannot see (capital appreciation, brand value, buybacks, M&A, growth optimism). Mega-cap compounders like COST, AAPL, MSFT routinely show "Overvalued" by DDM because most of their total return is share-price gains rather than dividends — that does not mean the stock is a bad investment, only that DDM is the wrong tool for valuing it. See also: DDM, Gordon Constant Growth Model, Two-Stage DDM, Required Rate of Return, Overvalued (by DDM), Undervalued (by DDM).

Individual Retirement Account where contributions are tax-deductible today and growth is tax-deferred — you pay ordinary income tax only when you withdraw in retirement (after age 59½). DRIP works great inside a Traditional IRA because no taxes are owed on reinvested dividends until withdrawal.

The annualised percentage rate that your specific cash has earned across every deposit, withdrawal, dividend, and price change. Personal-finance apps usually just call this “IRR”. The DiviDrip Net Capital Gain modal surfaces it as a 1-liner like “+8.4% / yr annualised over 3.2 years”.

How it's computed: we take every outside-money cashflow on its actual date (deposits are negative outflows from your pocket, withdrawals are positive inflows back) plus today's total portfolio value as a final positive cashflow, then solve for the rate that makes the net-present-value of all those flows equal zero. Mathematically it's called XIRR (IRR for irregular-date cashflows). DiviDrip uses bisection across [-99%, +1000%] — bulletproof, no overshoot risk.

Money-Weighted vs Time-Weighted:

• MWR / IRR (this one) — weights every dollar by both size and timing. A big deposit just before a rally weighs more in your return. Answers “what did MY money earn?”.
• TWR — neutralises cashflow timing by computing returns between each event and chaining. Used by mutual funds for fair manager comparison (manager doesn't control when capital arrives).

When it's not shown: if the holding window is under ~5 weeks, IRR isn't mathematically meaningful (short-window losses or gains extrapolate to absurd annualised numbers). DiviDrip suppresses the figure with a friendly “need more time” note instead of displaying a misleading −99%.

DiviDrip's built-in investing journal. Every entry captures what you were thinking at a specific moment — anchored to a ticker, a buy/sell, or just a free-form thought. The whole point: investors who write down their thesis BEFORE outcomes are known are clearer-headed than those who don't. Reading old entries six months later is one of the highest-ROI activities in investing.

Entry types — Thesis on Add (auto-suggested when you buy), Thesis on Sell (auto-suggested when you sell), Dividend-Cut Note (auto-suggested when one of your holdings cuts its dividend), Ex-Div Week (observations during ex-div week), Free Note (anything on your mind), Periodic Review (weekly / monthly self-review with guided prompts), JNL Starter (auto-drafted from Robinhood JNL rows when you import a CSV).

Per-entry fields — title, body (any length), optional emotion tag (Disciplined / Patient / Confident / Curious / FOMO / Panic / Regret), conviction slider 1–10 (charts against actual outcomes via the Conviction vs Outcome chart once you have 20+ entries), free-form tags (e.g. #core-position #yield-trap) with a curated picker so the dropdown grows with your habits. Entries linked to a trade also store a context snapshot — price, cost basis, dividend yield at the moment — so re-reading the entry later still shows the world as it was when you wrote it.

Where it lives — the standalone /journal page (full timeline, search, ticker / type / tag filters, weekly & monthly review prompts, Conviction vs Outcome chart) plus a per-stock Journal tab inside every Stock Modal so you can scan only that ticker's entries while researching it again. Click any tag chip to land on a dedicated /journal/tag/{tag} page listing every entry on that label.

Privacy & sharing — your journal is strictly login-gated. No public read URL exists. Each entry has a Share to X button that opens an X (Twitter) compose window pre-populated with a body excerpt + your tags as hashtags + #DiviDrip — manual broadcasting if you want, otherwise totally private.

Inspired by Tradervue / TraderSync / Edgewonk — three industry-leading trading-journal tools — but tilted to dividend investors' needs (thesis on add/trim, dividend-cut response, ex-div observations) rather than day-trader metrics. Journals are NOT wiped by Reset Portfolio — they're reflective records, valid even after the position is gone.

A tax form issued by partnerships (MLPs and many older futures-based commodity ETFs) instead of a 1099. K-1s arrive late in tax season, can complicate your return, and may require an extension. Modern dividend ETFs avoid them; look for "K-1 Free" funds (e.g., BCI, PDBC) when you want commodity exposure.

A DiviDrip game/feature focused on Dividend Kings — companies that have raised their dividend for 50+ consecutive years. The most elite tier of dividend stocks. Track your coverage and find names to add.

A public ranking of community members by their Diversification Score (sector + asset-type spread). DiviDrip deliberately does NOT rank members by yield, total return, or net worth — those metrics reward yield chasing and risk taking, the opposite of what a dividend-growth community should celebrate. Opt-in only.

An ETF designed to deliver 2× or 3× the daily return of an underlying index or stock. Daily resets cause "decay" over time — leveraged ETFs almost always underperform their expected multiple over weeks, months, and especially years. Built for short-term trading, not long-term dividend investing. Tagged with a red "Leveraged" badge in DiviDrip.

A cost-basis method that sells your NEWEST tax lots first. In a rising market the newest shares sit closest to the current price, so LIFO usually shows the smallest paper gain — but those shares have almost always been held under a year, so whatever gain IS realized gets taxed as a short-term capital gain at your ordinary income rate (up to 37% federally). Available in the Multi-Share Sell widget on your Portfolio page. See also: FIFO, HIFO, Short-Term vs Long-Term Capital Gains.

A cost-basis method that sells your CHEAPEST tax lots first, deliberately realizing the LARGEST gain. Sounds backwards, but it has three legitimate uses: tax-GAIN harvesting while you sit in the 0% long-term capital-gains bracket (realize gains tax-free and reset your basis higher), planning around charitable stock donations, and burning off large existing capital-loss carryovers. Risk: cheap lots can be short-term too, which drags the gain into ordinary income rates. Available in the Multi-Share Sell widget on your Portfolio page. See also: FIFO, HIFO, Tax Lot Optimizer.

The preferential federal tax treatment applied to profits from selling an investment held for more than one year. Same asset, same profit, different tax bill — the IRS taxes LTCG at lower rates than short-term gains as a policy incentive for holding assets long enough to fund productive capital formation instead of speculating on price swings.

2025 federal LTCG rates (based on taxable income; brackets adjust annually for inflation):

• 0% — Single filers with taxable income up to $48,350; MFJ up to $96,700. Yes, you read that right — a genuinely tax-free bracket that most retail investors don't realize applies to them until retirement.
• 15% — Single filers $48,351 to $533,400; MFJ $96,701 to $600,050. The bracket where most middle- and upper-middle-income households sit.
• 20% — Single filers above $533,400; MFJ above $600,050. Plus the 3.8% NIIT surtax once MAGI crosses $200K single / $250K MFJ, bringing the effective top federal rate on LTCG to 23.8%.

The 1-year clock: the holding period starts the day after the trade date and ends on the sale date. If you bought on March 15, 2024, the earliest sale that qualifies for LTCG treatment is March 16, 2025. Selling on March 15, 2025 is still short-term. The difference between short-term and long-term treatment on a single trade can be worth 10+ percentage points of after-tax return for high earners.

Why it matters for non-dividend investors: Non-dividend stocks compound their entire return inside the share price, so the exit tax is the only tax you pay. Structuring exits around the 1-year mark is one of the highest-leverage tax decisions in the equity portfolio playbook. See the Exit Strategy for Non-Dividend Stocks Learn guide for the trigger-timing framework.

Contrast with short-term gains: Gains on positions held one year or less are taxed as ordinary income (up to 37% federal in 2025), plus the same 3.8% NIIT surtax if applicable. Full comparison in the Short-Term vs Long-Term Capital Gains entry.

See also: Short-Term vs Long-Term Capital Gains, NIIT (Net Investment Income Tax), MAGI (Modified Adjusted Gross Income), FIFO (First-In, First-Out), HIFO (Highest-In, First-Out), Tax-Loss Harvest, Wash Sale.

Pronounced "MAG-ee". Your Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) from line 11 of Form 1040, with certain deductions added back in — most commonly student-loan interest, foreign earned-income exclusions, and traditional-IRA contributions. MAGI is the income line the IRS uses to test eligibility for a long list of benefits and surtaxes: Roth IRA contribution limits, the 3.8% Net Investment Income Tax (NIIT), IRMAA Medicare-premium surcharges, the American Opportunity tax credit, and more. For most dividend investors with simple returns, MAGI is essentially the same number as AGI. Why it matters: NIIT thresholds (Single $200K · MFJ $250K) are MAGI-based, so any income line that raises MAGI — including Traditional IRA / 401(k) distributions and Roth conversions — can pull your taxable-account dividends across the NIIT threshold line even if those distributions are not themselves "investment income". See also: NIIT.

Buying a stock for meaningfully less than your conservative estimate of its intrinsic value, so unforeseen problems do not turn into losses. Coined by Benjamin Graham, popularized by Warren Buffett. The bigger the margin of safety, the more room for being wrong about the future.

Total value of all the company's shares = share price × shares outstanding. DiviDrip groups stocks into Mega ($200B+), Large ($10B–$200B), Mid ($2B–$10B), Small ($300M–$2B), and Micro (under $300M).

The future date on which a bond or baby bond legally must return your principal — typically the original $25 par value per share — and stop paying coupons. After that date the security ceases to exist. Example: GECCG ("7.75% Notes Due 2030") matures in 2030; if you hold to maturity you receive $25 per share back plus the final coupon, ending the cash flow. Three things matter about maturity: (1) it caps your downside if the security trades below par (you eventually get $25 back regardless of how low the market price goes, assuming no default), (2) it caps your upside if it trades above par (you can't collect more than $25 at maturity), and (3) it gives you a known wind-down date for tax planning. Preferred shares typically have NO maturity — they're "perpetual" and pay coupons forever (or until called). That's a key risk difference: a baby bond gives you a guaranteed exit at par; a preferred share leaves you exposed to whatever the market price is whenever you decide to sell. See also: Baby Bond, Call Risk (Callable / Call Date), Par Value, Preferred Shares.

A passive-income achievement badge earned by DiviDrip Community members. Eight tiers, from "Coffee Payer" ($100/yr projected dividend income) all the way up to "Lifestyle Fund" ($30,000/yr). Computed nightly from your real portfolio × dividend data — no manual claiming. Designed to shift focus away from daily price noise toward the growing paycheck.

A publicly traded partnership, usually in energy infrastructure (pipelines, storage). MLPs offer high yields but issue Schedule K-1 tax forms instead of 1099s, which can complicate taxes and disqualify them from many retirement accounts.

A moat is a company's sustainable competitive advantage that protects its market share and long-term profits from competitors. Popularized by Warren Buffett, the term uses the metaphor of a medieval castle: the business is the "castle," and the moat is the barrier that makes it difficult for "marauding" rivals to enter the market and steal profits.

A dividend frequency where the company pays out 12 dividends per year — one every month. Popular with retirees because the income matches monthly bills like rent, mortgage, and utilities. Realty Income (O) trademarked the slogan "The Monthly Dividend Company"; other examples include STAG Industrial, Main Street Capital, and most BDCs and CEFs. See "Dividend Frequency" for the full list (Weekly / Monthly / Quarterly / Semi-Annually / Annually).

A DiviDrip feature where you set a target monthly dividend income (e.g., $2,000/mo) and the app tracks how close your portfolio is to hitting it. Useful for visualizing FIRE/retirement timelines.

Annual dividend income ÷ 12 — a quick "if nothing changes, this is what my portfolio pays me per month" estimate. Shown on both Now and What-If result cards in the simulator, and on the portfolio Paycheck Strip. Different from actual monthly payments (which depend on each stock's payment frequency); run-rate smooths everything into an even monthly figure.

A 1-5 star rating Morningstar assigns based on a fund's risk-adjusted returns vs peers in the same category over 3, 5, and 10-year periods. A 5-star fund is in the top 10% of its category historically. The rating updates monthly. As Morningstar themselves disclose, this is backward-looking and past performance is no guarantee of future results.

A DiviDrip view (logged-in users) that lists every position you own — share count, cost basis, current value, gain/loss, dividend income, yield, and Yield on Cost. Backed by your transaction log.

A read-only public link of your portfolio (anonymized — no email or name shown unless you choose to). Useful for showing off coverage on social media or sharing strategy with friends without revealing your account.

For ETFs and CEFs: the per-share value of everything the fund holds, minus debts. Regular ETFs trade very close to NAV thanks to arbitrage; CEFs can trade at a premium or discount to NAV.

A violet "Near 52w low" chip that fires on Watchlist rows when the stock's current price is within 5% of its 52-week low (the lowest price the stock has traded at over the past year). Often a possible buying opportunity for quality dividend names that have been temporarily punished by the market — but always confirm fundamentals haven't deteriorated before adding (the price could be falling for a real reason: earnings miss, dividend cut announcement, sector-wide selloff). Pairs well with the Quality Score (a high-quality stock near its 52-week low is the textbook setup for "buy good companies on sale"). Watchlist view only.

Total Debt (long-term + short-term) MINUS Cash and Equivalents and Short-Term Investments. The "true" debt load — what the company would STILL owe if it used every available cash dollar to pay creditors today. Net debt zero or negative = "net cash position", a fortress balance sheet (think Apple's ~$60B net cash). Positive net debt that's low relative to EBITDA (under 2× = conservative; 3–4× = average; 5×+ = leveraged) tells you how much breathing room the company has if earnings stumble. Critical for dividend safety: a company with net cash can keep paying dividends through a recession on cash alone; a company with high net debt may need to refinance maturing debt at higher rates exactly when earnings are weakest. See also: D/E (Debt-to-Equity Ratio), Tangible Book Value.

Net Income ÷ Revenue, expressed as a percentage. The bottom-line profitability number. Above 15% is excellent; below 5% is thin and risky for dividend sustainability.

Pronounced "N-double-I-T". A 3.8% federal surtax layered on top of regular income tax for high earners, enacted under the Affordable Care Act in 2013 and never indexed for inflation. It applies to the LESSER of (a) your net investment income (taxable-account dividends, capital gains, rental income, taxable bond interest) or (b) the dollar amount by which your MAGI exceeds the threshold — Single/HoH $200,000, Married Filing Jointly $250,000, Married Filing Separately $125,000. For a top-bracket investor, qualified dividends effectively jump from 20% to 23.8% and ordinary dividends from 37% to 40.8%. Money inside a Roth IRA, Roth 401(k), Traditional IRA, 401(k), and HSAs is fully exempt from NIIT — one of the biggest reasons high-income dividend investors prefer tax-advantaged accounts for income-heavy positions. Reported on IRS Form 8960. See also: MAGI, Qualified Dividends, Tax Drag.

Pronounced "N-O-I" (each letter). The pure operating-profit number for a real-estate property — rent collected minus operating expenses (property management, taxes, insurance, repairs). NOI is calculated BEFORE depreciation, interest expense, and corporate overhead, so it isolates how productive the buildings themselves are. The most meaningful REIT growth metric is "Same-Property NOI Growth" or "Same-Store NOI" — what the buildings the REIT already owned last year are doing this year (filters out the boost from buying new properties). A good REIT typically grows same-property NOI 2-5% per year; standout sectors like industrial, data centers, and self-storage have run 6-10%. NOI is a "leading" indicator for FFO and AFFO — when same-property NOI is accelerating, dividend growth usually follows within a year or two. NOI lives in the REIT's quarterly supplemental filing on its investor-relations site, not in regular yfinance feeds. See also: AFFO, FFO, REIT.

The raw, headline dividend yield percentage every stock tracker shows — annual dividends ÷ current market value. “Nominal” because it's measured in tomorrow's dollars, not inflation-adjusted purchasing power. If a stock pays a $4 annual dividend at a $100 price, the nominal yield is 4%.

Why the distinction matters: a 4% nominal yield sounds solid, but if inflation (CPI YoY) is running at 4%, your income is barely treading water — the same basket of groceries and gas rises in cost at exactly the rate your dividends grow. Compare against the Real Yield below to see whether you're actually gaining purchasing power.

Where DiviDrip shows it: the Stock Table's Yield column defaults to nominal; the tiny “Nominal / Real” pill above every stock table lets you flip the display. Portfolio KPI cards show the nominal yield as the headline number with a real-yield subline underneath.

See also: Real Yield, CPI (Consumer Price Index) / CPI Protection, Yield on Cost.

A regulatory label (under the Investment Company Act of 1940) for a fund that is allowed to concentrate a larger chunk of its assets in fewer holdings than a "diversified" fund. The technical line: a diversified fund must put no more than 5% of assets in any single issuer for at least 75% of its portfolio; non-diversified funds can break that rule, putting 10%, 20%, or even more in a single holding. The trade-off: bigger conviction bets can drive bigger gains when the call is right, but a single blow-up hurts much harder than it would in a 100-name index fund. Many specialty funds are intentionally non-diversified — sector ETFs, single-country funds, themed funds (cybersecurity, lithium, AI), and funds focused on a niche asset class like CLOs or emerging-market debt (e.g., JEMB). The "Non-Diversified" label is a heads-up to read the holdings and understand the concentration risk before buying.

The cash a company actually generated from running its core business over the period — operating revenue minus operating expenses, adjusted for non-cash items (depreciation, amortization) and changes in working capital (receivables, payables, inventory). Identical concept to Cash from Operations (CFO) — different teams use different acronyms but the calculation is the same. Sits as the first major line on the Cash Flow Statement, before Investing and Financing activities. Drives DiviDrip's OCF Multiplier valuation model in the Non-Dividend Valuation Matrix — the "Owner Earnings · OCF" badge means the card is using 3-year average OCF per share × your target P/OCF multiple to compute a target buy price. See also: Cash from Operations (CFO), Free Cash Flow, Owner Earnings Multiplier, Target P/OCF Multiple, FCFE (Free Cash Flow to Equity).

Operating Income ÷ Revenue. What's left of every sales dollar after BOTH the cost of goods sold AND operating expenses (SG&A, R&D, depreciation) — but BEFORE interest expense and taxes. A purer measure of core-business profitability than Net Margin because it ignores financing decisions (interest), tax-jurisdiction differences, and one-time items. Healthy software companies often hit 30-40% operating margins; consumer staples 15-25%; airlines 5-10% (when not losing money); supermarkets 2-4%. Direction matters more than absolute level — a company growing operating margin year over year is improving its scale advantages, pricing power, or cost discipline. A shrinking operating margin signals input-cost pressure, competition, or bloating overhead. See also: Gross Margin, Net Margin (Profit Margin), EBITDA.

A combined z-score that captures whether a company's top-line growth AND operating margin are accelerating, plateauing, or decelerating relative to its own 5-year history. Computed as: (ΔRevenue YoY ÷ σ Revenue 5y) + (ΔMargin YoY ÷ σ Margin 5y). The output is in standard-deviation units. A positive number means the business is accelerating beyond its historical norm; negative means it is contracting; zero means scaling linearly. Especially useful in cyclical sectors (semiconductors, materials, freight, autos) where the moment revenue or margin starts decelerating is often the inflection-point signal — months before EPS or the stock price reacts. One of the factors in DiviDrip's Capital Reinvestment Score. The Capital Analytics tab displays the raw OM value alongside a threshold bar so you can see at a glance whether a stock is mid-acceleration or rolling over. See also: Capital Reinvestment Score, CFROI (Cash-Flow Return on Invested Capital), Revenue CAGR (3-Year).

An "option" is a contract that gives the buyer the RIGHT (not the obligation) to buy or sell a stock or index at a set price by a set date. The buyer pays a one-time fee called the "premium"; the seller (called the "writer") collects that premium up front. Calls = right to BUY. Puts = right to SELL. ETFs that build their entire investment thesis around buying or writing options are called options-overlay or defined-outcome funds, and they've become one of the fastest-growing corners of the dividend-ETF universe.

The strategies you'll see in real prospectuses (Innovator, JPMorgan, Global X, Defiance, NEOS, etc.):

• Covered Call (Buy-Write): The fund OWNS the stocks or index and SELLS call options against the holdings. The premiums collected become monthly income. The trade-off: if the index rallies sharply past the call's strike price, the fund's upside is capped — the buyer of the call gets the gains above that line. Best in flat or slowly-rising markets; underperforms in big bull rallies. Examples: JEPI, JEPQ, QYLD, XYLD, RYLD, SPYI, QQQI. ► State Street SPDR Premium Income family (11 funds) →
• Put-Write (Cash-Secured Put / Daily Put-Write): The fund holds cash or Treasuries and SELLS put options on a stock or index. The premium collected becomes income. If the index FALLS below the strike at expiration, the fund is obligated to buy at that strike (effectively buying the dip). Innovator's SPUT writes puts every single trading day — the "daily" cadence smooths out timing risk. Generates equity-like income while keeping the principal in cash most of the time. Examples: SPUT (Innovator daily put-write), PUTW, WTPI.
• Collar (Protective Collar): The fund holds the stock or index AND simultaneously BUYS a put (downside insurance) AND SELLS a call (to pay for the insurance). Brackets returns on both sides — losses are capped, but so are gains. Lower yields than pure covered-call funds because some of the premium is spent on the protective put. Used when an investor wants equity exposure with a known max-loss cushion.
• Buffer / Defined Outcome: Innovator's signature. Uses custom FLEX options on a stock index (S&P 500, Nasdaq-100, etc.) over a fixed 1-year outcome period to deliver TWO defined outcomes simultaneously: a CAPPED upside (e.g., +12% to +18%) and a DOWNSIDE BUFFER (the fund absorbs the first 9%, 15%, or 30% of losses; you only feel losses beyond the buffer). Reset annually. The famous "Power Buffer", "Buffer", and "Ultra Buffer" series are all built on this. Examples: Innovator BAUG, BJUL, BJAN, PJUL, UJUL; First Trust FAUG; AllianzIM AZBA.
• Floor ETF: A close cousin of buffer — instead of absorbing the FIRST N% of losses, the fund hard-caps the maximum loss at a defined number (e.g., "you cannot lose more than 10% over the outcome period"). Cleaner for retirees who care about a known worst case. Upside cap tends to be a bit lower as the cost of the harder floor. Examples: Innovator TFLR (Equity Managed Floor).
• Accelerated / Stacker ETF: Uses options to deliver 2× or even 3× of the index's upside up to a cap, while keeping 1× downside. Stacker ETFs "stack" one index on top of another (e.g., S&P 500 + Russell 2000) into a single fund. High potential upside but real downside risk. Examples: Innovator XBJL, QTJL; Stacker EQLS.
• Barrier ETF: A buffer that "knocks out" if the underlying breaches a defined barrier (e.g., -10%). As long as the index stays above the barrier, the buffer protects you. Cross the barrier intra-period and the buffer disappears — full downside exposure resumes. Higher upside cap than a regular buffer ETF in exchange for the knock-out risk. Examples: Innovator BFEB.
• Premium Income / Option-Overlay: Umbrella term for any fund whose monthly distributions come primarily from selling options on its holdings. Includes covered-call funds, put-write funds, and combinations. Many YieldMax single-stock funds (TSLY, NVDY, CONY) are option-overlay funds using synthetic covered-call structures to generate eye-popping yields with corresponding NAV decay risk.

⚠️ Common gotcha: Options-strategy ETFs almost always look great in flat or sideways markets and look painful during sharp bull rallies (the cap kicks in) or sustained bear markets (the buffer/floor only protects so much). Read the prospectus's "outcome period" section carefully — buffer/floor protections only hold if you buy at the start of the period and hold to the end. Buying mid-period gets you a different (often worse) effective cap and buffer than the headline number.

See also: CEF (Closed-End Fund), Derivatives, Hedge (Hedging), Leveraged ETF, Options-Income ETF.

An ETF that generates monthly distributions by writing (selling) call options against the stocks or indices it holds. Examples: JEPI, JEPQ, QYLD, the YieldMax single-stock funds. The trade-off: you collect higher monthly income but cap your upside if the underlying rallies hard. Yields are often 7–15% — sometimes legitimate, sometimes a warning zone — always check NAV trend over 1–3 years before trusting the headline yield.

The Insights tab's Valuation Matrix labels a stock "Overvalued" when the live market price is more than 5% above the DDM target buy price (intrinsic value). It means the dividend stream alone, given your required rate of return, does NOT justify the price — the market is pricing in something DDM cannot see: capital appreciation, brand value, future buybacks, M&A premium, or just enthusiasm. Mega-cap compounders (COST, AAPL, MSFT, V, MA) routinely show "Overvalued" because most of their long-run return comes from share-price gains, not dividends. That is NOT a sell signal — it is a reminder that DDM is meant for steady income payers, and for growth-tilted names you should weigh price-based metrics (P/E, P/FCF, PEG) alongside it. See also: Undervalued (by DDM), DDM, Intrinsic Value (Target Buy Price), Required Rate of Return.

A label used by the Kings / Aristocrats / Achievers Undervaluation Heatmap pages when a stock's composite score falls in the deep-red end of the diverging color scale. The composite blends three quantitative factors: current TTM yield vs its own 3-year mean (40%, structural cheapness), a beta-adjusted 30-day dislocation vs the stock's SPDR sector ETF (35%, tactical timing), and free-cash-flow dividend coverage (25%, safety). Red does NOT necessarily mean "the stock is a bad company" — it means the current price + yield combination looks unattractive on all three quant lenses simultaneously. TWO HARD OVERRIDES force red regardless of the other scores: (1) dividend is not covered by free cash flow (fcf_payout ≥ 100%), and (2) TTM yield is ≥ 2.5× its own 3-year mean, which usually signals a distressed name whose yield spiked because the price collapsed on bad news (the "Distressed Yield Aberration" trap). Different from "Overvalued (by DDM)" — that label only prices the dividend stream; this label combines value, timing, and safety together. Educational screen, not investment advice. See also: Undervalued (Heatmap Composite), Chowder Score, TTM, FCF, Beta.

A Buffett-style valuation fallback used by DiviDrip's Non-Dividend Valuation Matrix when the Two-Stage FCFE model produces nonsense (which happens when the required return drops at or below the company's growth rate, dividing by ~zero). Computes a target buy price by multiplying trailing "owner earnings" (Operating Cash Flow − maintenance Capex) by a multiple anchored to the company's growth profile and sector norms. Avoids the infinite-value trap of pure DCF math on high-growth names like NFLX or TSLA. Coined by Warren Buffett in his 1986 Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letter as "the relevant item for valuation purposes — both for investors in buying stocks and for managers in buying entire businesses." See also: Two-Stage FCFE Valuation, FCFE, Cash from Operations (CFO), Free Cash Flow.

Share price ÷ Book Value. Helpful for valuing financial companies (banks, insurers) and asset-heavy businesses (REITs). Below 1.0 means the market values the company at less than its accounting book value — sometimes a bargain, sometimes a warning.

Current Price ÷ Cash Flow Per Share. Often considered more reliable than P/E because cash flow is much harder to manipulate through accounting choices (depreciation methods, inventory accounting, stock-based comp). P/CF < 10 is cheap for most established businesses; > 20 is expensive outside of high-growth tech.

Share price ÷ EPS. A quick valuation snapshot. Under 10 = "value" territory (cheap, but maybe for a reason). 10–20 = fairly valued. 20–30 = priced for growth. Above 30 = high-growth or richly valued. Always compare to peers and to the company's own historical range.

Current Price ÷ Revenue Per Share — how much investors pay per dollar of sales. Especially useful for companies with no earnings yet (growth tech, early-stage businesses, biotech) where the P/E ratio is undefined or meaningless. P/S < 1 generally signals a cheap valuation; P/S > 10 signals heavy growth expectations baked into the price.

The fixed nominal value printed on a bond, baby bond, or preferred share at issuance — the amount the issuer promises to return at maturity (for bonds) and the base figure used to calculate the coupon. For virtually all exchange-traded baby bonds and preferred shares, par value is $25. (Institutional bonds use $1,000 par; some legacy preferreds use $50 or $100 par; depositary shares wrap high-par underlying preferreds — $25,000+ — into $25 effective par fragments.) Par value is the ANCHOR point for two key calculations: (1) annual coupon income = par × coupon rate (e.g. $25 × 7.75% = $1.9375/yr), and (2) the redemption price if the issuer calls or matures the security. Par value does NOT change over the life of the security — but the MARKET price can drift above or below it based on prevailing interest rates and credit conditions. When a baby bond trades above par ("premium"), buyers face call risk; below par ("discount"), buyers get higher current yield + a potential capital gain at maturity. See also: Coupon Rate, Call Risk, Baby Bond, Preferred Shares, Depositary Share.

The day the dividend cash actually settles into your brokerage account — what Robinhood, Fidelity, Schwab, etc. will post as the deposit date. Always after the ex-dividend date — typically 1 day later for monthly options-income ETFs and weekly-pay funds, 2–4 weeks later for most quarterly stocks. DiviDrip uses the broker-settled date from our primary data feed (Massive), which matches what your brokerage actually shows. Note: some smaller issuers (e.g. NestYield's EGGY/EGGS/EGGQ) publish a "payment date" on their own website that lands 1 day later than the broker settlement — that gap usually reflects when the issuer initiates payment vs when the cash clears at the brokerage. Trust your brokerage's posted date: that's when the money is actually available, when DRIPs trigger, and when tax timing crystallises.

Dividend ÷ Earnings, expressed as a percentage. Below 60% = safe with room to grow. 60–80% = moderate, sustainable but limited upside. 80–100% = high, almost no margin of safety. Above 100% = the company is paying more than it earns, which is usually unsustainable.

A non-profit US regulator created by the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act to inspect the auditors of every public company that files with the SEC. Its job is to verify that Big Four and other audit firms actually followed generally-accepted auditing standards on each filing — a lack of PCAOB inspection access means US regulators cannot verify the underlying audit work, which is a red flag for any ADR filer. Chinese ADRs sit at the center of this issue: from 2013 to 2022 Chinese law blocked PCAOB inspectors from accessing audit working papers held on the mainland, and the 2020 Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act (HFCAA) turned that block into a delisting trigger. An August 2022 US-China agreement restored PCAOB inspection access to most Chinese ADRs, but names that remain on the SEC HFCAA non-compliance list face a three-year clock before mandatory delisting. Practical rule for a US investor: any ADR you own should have its auditor on the current PCAOB inspection list — a lapse is a signal to trim the position.

PEG = P/E ratio ÷ earnings growth rate (as a whole-number percent). It standardises P/E across companies that grow at different speeds, so you can compare a slow-growth utility against a fast-growth compounder on the same yardstick. Example: a stock with a P/E of 20 and 10%/yr projected earnings growth has a PEG of 2.0; another stock with the same P/E of 20 but 25%/yr growth has a PEG of 0.8 — the second is much cheaper for what you're getting. The classic interpretation: PEG ≈ 1.0 = fairly valued for its growth; below 1.0 = potentially undervalued; above 1.0 = the price is rising faster than earnings. CAVEATS: (1) PEG is only as good as the growth estimate it uses, and analyst forecasts can be wildly optimistic; trailing PEG (using actual past growth) is more honest than forward PEG (using broker projections). (2) Negative growth makes PEG meaningless. (3) For ETFs, things get fuzzy: equity ETFs publish a weighted-average composite P/E (the P/E of every holding weighted by its share of the fund), and platforms like Morningstar publish a portfolio-wide projected growth rate — you can divide them to get a fund-level PEG, but constant rebalancing and macro shifts make portfolio-wide PEGs unstable. For non-equity ETFs (bonds, commodities) PEG does not apply at all. Institutional investors typically lean on Yield, P/B (Price-to-Book), P/CF (Price-to-Cash Flow), and Premium/Discount to NAV when judging ETFs instead. See also: P/E, P/B, P/CF, EPS Growth (5-Yr CAGR), Forward Earnings Growth.

The arithmetic difference between two percentages — written as "pp" or "ppts" so it can't be confused with a percent (%) move. If a stock yield moves from 4% to 6%, that's a +2 percentage-point change (+2pp), NOT a +2 percent change (which would be 4% × 1.02 = 4.08%). Percent always refers to a RELATIVE change against a base; pp refers to the ABSOLUTE arithmetic gap between two rates. DiviDrip uses pp whenever it compares two rates side-by-side so the math stays unambiguous: "Portfolio vs 10Y +1.27pp" means the portfolio yield is 1.27 percentage points above the 10-year Treasury yield — not 1.27% higher in relative terms (which would only be a ~30 bps move). The same convention shows up in our Yield vs Sector tiles, Yield Spread vs 10Y, and the inverted-curve / 2Y vs 10Y commentary. Bonus precision: 1pp = 100 basis points (bps), so +1.27pp = +127 bps if you prefer the bond-market vocabulary.

The percentage of a fund's holdings replaced each year. Index funds typically run 5-20% (low — passive, tax-efficient). Actively managed funds often 50-150% (the manager is constantly buying and selling). High turnover means more taxable capital gains distributions in non-IRA accounts AND higher hidden trading costs that erode returns even when not visible in the expense ratio.

Your holdings of a particular stock — usually a number of shares with a known cost basis. Tracked individually in My Portfolio so DiviDrip can compute gain/loss and per-position dividend income.

A class of equity ownership that sits ABOVE common stock and BELOW debt in the corporate capital stack. Buying a preferred share means you own a slice of the company (it's equity, not a loan) — but unlike common shares, the dividend is FIXED at a specific coupon rate locked in at issuance (e.g. “5.375% Non-Cumulative Preferred Stock, Series C”). The math: par value ($25 typically) × coupon = annual dividend. So BHFAN with a 5.375% coupon pays $1.34/yr per share, in quarterly installments of $0.336.

Why investors buy them: higher yield than the issuer's common stock or its bonds (often 5-8%), with stronger payment priority than common — the company can't pay ANY common dividend until preferred dividends are current.

Key risks:

• Perpetual — most preferreds have no maturity date. No guaranteed exit at par; you live with market-price drift forever (or until called).
• Call risk — issuer can usually redeem at par after 5 years. If you bought above $25 you take a capital loss on call.
• Interest-rate sensitivity — when rates rise, preferred prices fall (their fixed coupon becomes less attractive). Can drop 15-25% in a rate-spike year.
• Non-cumulative risk — if non-cumulative, skipped dividends are gone forever (see Cumulative vs Non-Cumulative).
• Capital stack position — in bankruptcy, preferred holders are paid AFTER bondholders. Recovery is often near zero.

Common name patterns DiviDrip parses: “X.YZ% Cumulative Preferred Stock”, “X.YZ% Non-Cumulative Preferred Stock, Series A”, “X.YZ% Series B Preferred”, “Depositary shares ... X.YZ%”. Examples: BHFAN, MS-PrF, USB-PrH, ALL-PrI.

Distinct from “Preferred Stock (PN)”: in Brazilian dual-class ADRs (e.g. BBD), “PN” means “Preferenciais” — a different structure entirely. See that entry for ADR-specific mechanics.

See also: Preferred Units, Par Value, Coupon Rate, Cumulative vs Non-Cumulative (Preferred Shares), Capital Stack, Call Risk (Callable / Call Date), Depositary Share, Fixed-Rate Asset, Hybrid Security.

In the context of dual-class Brazilian ADRs (e.g., BBD), "PN" stands for "Preferenciais" — preferred shares that carry no voting rights but receive dividends roughly 10% higher than common shares and have 80% tag-along rights. NOT the same as the U.S. concept of "Preferred Shares / Preferred Stock" — see that entry for the fixed-rate income instrument used by U.S. banks, REITs, and BDCs.

The Master Limited Partnership / Limited Partnership cousin of preferred shares. Functionally similar — a fixed-coupon income instrument that ranks above common units in the partnership's distribution waterfall — but legally distinct because the issuer is a PARTNERSHIP (LP/LLP/LLC), not a corporation. Example: BPYPP (“Brookfield Property Partners L.P. Cumulative Redeemable Perpetual Preferred Units, Series A”).

The big tax difference vs preferred shares: distributions are reported on a Schedule K-1, not a 1099-DIV. That means:

• K-1s arrive late in tax season — often March / April rather than January — which can force a tax-extension filing.
• Distributions are NOT “dividends” for tax purposes — they're partnership distributions, often partially return-of-capital, partially Unrelated Business Taxable Income (UBTI).
• Holding inside a Roth IRA or Traditional IRA can trigger UBTI tax once UBTI exceeds $1,000/yr — destroying the tax-advantaged shelter. Best held in a regular taxable brokerage.
• State tax filings may be required in every state where the partnership operates (most retail investors get away with home-state only, but technically you're an “owner” in those states).

Math is identical to preferred shares: par × coupon = annual distribution. DiviDrip's baby-bond / preferred parser recognises “Preferred Units” as well as “Preferred Stock” name patterns and applies the same par-value override (asset_class = preferred_unit, is_equity = true, is_partnership = true). The Stock Modal's educational notice adds a “K-1 issuer — UBTI risk in IRA” caveat to distinguish the tax treatment.

Common in: midstream energy (Enterprise Products Partners, Energy Transfer), property partnerships (Brookfield), some closed-end shipping and finance vehicles. Largely a U.S. retail phenomenon.

See also: Preferred Shares, K-1 (Schedule K-1), MLP (Master Limited Partnership), Par Value, Coupon Rate, Fixed-Rate Asset.

The closing price from the most recent COMPLETED trading session. Today's daily change percentage is computed as (Current Price − Previous Close) / Previous Close. On Monday morning this is Friday's close; on a Tuesday after a Monday holiday, it's the prior Friday's close.

A named list of up to 5 tickers that a DiviDrip Community member has explicitly chosen to publish. Each member can publish up to 3 public watchlists (15 tickers max across all of them). Share counts and dollar amounts are NEVER published — only the tickers. A green "Verified Owner ✓" checkmark appears next to a ticker if the owner has actually imported a lot for it via CSV in the last 90 days. Other members can browse and follow public watchlists from the Community Hub.

A click-to-open popover that breaks the Dividend Quality Score (0-100) into its five contributing pillars: Safety (payout ratio), Yield, Growth (5-year dividend CAGR), Longevity (King/Aristocrat/Achiever streak), and Fundamentals (FinImpulse ROE/D/E/revenue-stability/dividend-policy bonuses or penalties). Each pillar shows points-earned out of points-possible plus a coloured progress bar; firing fundamental bonuses (e.g. "Strong ROE 18.4% +5") and structural penalties (e.g. "High Debt/Equity 2.7 −5") are listed individually below. Open it by clicking ANY Quality Score badge: on the Stock Modal header, on Portfolio rows, or on Screener results rows. Designed for one-click "should I add to this position?" gut-checks.

The Growth tab's 0–100 fundamental quality score for non-dividend stocks (different from the dividend-side Quality Breakdown, and different from the Capital Quality Rank). Built from 7 weighted signals: Revenue 3yr CAGR (20pts), EPS 3yr CAGR (20pts), Return on Equity (15pts), Free Cash Flow (15pts), Debt/Equity (10pts), P/E (10pts), Gross Margin TTM (10pts). Rubric: growth (40pts) + profitability (40pts) + valuation (10pts) + margin (10pts). Tier mapping: 75+ = GROWTH-A (top tier), 60–74 = GROWTH-B, 40–59 = GROWTH-C, < 40 = unscored / weak fundamentals. Recomputed nightly from Massive Ratios + Income statements. See also: Capital Quality Rank (1–100), Quality Breakdown (Pillar Popover), Gross Margin, ROE, Free Cash Flow.

A dividend frequency where the company pays out four dividends per year — one every three months. The most common dividend schedule for U.S. stocks; the vast majority of S&P 500 dividend payers are on a quarterly cadence. See "Dividend Frequency" for the full list of frequencies (Weekly / Monthly / Quarterly / Semi-Annually / Annually).

(Current Assets − Inventory) ÷ Current Liabilities. A TOUGHER liquidity check than Current Ratio because it strips out inventory — which may not convert to cash quickly (or at all, if it goes stale). Above 1.0 means the company can cover its short-term bills even if it can't sell a single widget for a year. Below 0.8 is a clear liquidity warning, especially for capital-light businesses (where inventory shouldn't be the cushion). Software, banks, and insurers usually have Quick Ratio ≈ Current Ratio because they hold almost no inventory; retailers and manufacturers can show big differences. Also called the "Acid Test" because it's the harsher of the two standard liquidity ratios. See also: Current Ratio, Cash Ratio.

A two-state pill control that appears above every stock table (Watchlist, Portfolio, Screener, Rebalancer) and on both DRIP calculators + the 12-Month Income Heatmap. Flips displayed yields (and future-dollar projections in the calculators / heatmap) between two lenses:

• Nominal — the raw dividend-÷-price percentage. What every other tracker shows. Filters and sorts always run against this value at the backend so your saved settings are unaffected by the toggle.
• Real (−X.X%/yr) — Fisher-exact real yield: (1 + Nominal) ÷ (1 + CPI YoY) − 1. Negative values render red (income losing purchasing power); positive stay green.

The toggle's state persists in your browser (localStorage key dividrip.yieldMode) so your preference sticks across sessions and pages. In DRIP calculators, “Real” mode deflates every future-dollar output by (1 + CPI)^years so 10-year projections land in today's purchasing power — turning a “$123k in 10 years!” nominal figure into the more honest “~$81k in today's dollars”.

See also: Real Yield, Nominal Yield, CPI (Consumer Price Index) / CPI Protection.

The inflation-adjusted version of a stock's or portfolio's dividend yield. DiviDrip uses the exact Fisher equation: Real Yield = (1 + Nominal Yield) ÷ (1 + CPI YoY) − 1. This is more accurate than the linear approximation (Nominal − CPI) that most trackers use — the difference is small at low yields but compounds meaningfully for high-yield names (BDCs, covered-call ETFs) and during high-inflation regimes. Answers the question “is the income I'm earning actually growing my purchasing power, or just keeping up with the cost of living?”

Worked example: at CPI YoY of 4.17%, a stock yielding 4.00% has a Fisher-exact real yield of −0.163% — meaning every dividend dollar buys slightly LESS this year than last. A stock yielding 6.00% has a real yield of +1.756%. High-yield covered-call ETFs (JEPI, JEPQ), BDCs (MAIN, ARCC, OBDC), and mortgage REITs (AGNC, NLY) are among the few equity categories currently producing positive real yields; classic dividend growers in the 2–3% range are all deeply negative today.

Where DiviDrip shows it:

• A “Nominal / Real” pill above every stock table (Watchlist, Portfolio, Screener, Rebalancer) that swaps the Yield column display live.
• Under the “Nominal Yield” tile on every per-portfolio card (Portfolio Contrast) as a colored subline: green = beating inflation, red = losing purchasing power.
• Under the Portfolio Summary's Portfolio Yield and Yield on Cost KPIs.
• Under both slots of the Portfolio Blend vs Ticker comparison card.
• Under the DRIP calculators (single-stock and portfolio) — flipping the toggle deflates every future-dollar output to today's purchasing power.
• The 12-Month Income Heatmap has the same toggle, applying per-month midpoint deflation so near months barely move and far months get the full haircut.

What CPI YoY DiviDrip uses: Consumer Price Index year-over-year, refreshed from the Massive Fed Economy API (CPI is a monthly release; DiviDrip caches for 7 days). Some economists prefer Core CPI or PCE for real-return math; if you have a preferred benchmark you can eyeball the difference — Core is typically ~0.3–0.5% lower than headline CPI when energy prices are spiking.

See also: Nominal Yield, CPI (Consumer Price Index) / CPI Protection, Yield on Cost, Real vs Nominal Yield toggle.

A Quick Screens preset that surfaces stocks whose ex-dividend date fell in the past 7 days. Sorted newest-first (most recent ex-div at the top), then alphabetically within each day. Use cases: (1) spotting names you almost owned in time, (2) sanity-checking that you didn't miss buying a stock you meant to, (3) seeing which stocks just paid out across the dividend market. Mutually exclusive with the "Upcoming Ex-Div" filter — they look at opposite ends of the same calendar.

The day the company looks at its books to decide who owns shares and is therefore entitled to the upcoming dividend. Usually one business day after the ex-dividend date. Day-to-day investors only need to remember the ex-div date.

An optional sub-toggle on the Top Yielder Stock Crash and Top-Yielder-Cuts-Div presets (and on Custom Changes with action = crash or dividend cut). Pick Permanent (default — no bounce-back) or 3y / 5y / 10y. When >0, the crashed ticker's price and dividend linearly interpolate from the crashed value back up to the pre-crash value over that many years, then normal growth resumes — modelling realistic black-swan recoveries instead of permanent craters.

Pronounced "reet". A company that owns, operates, or finances income-producing real estate across sectors like apartments, offices, malls, warehouses, data centers, cell towers, healthcare facilities, hotels, or mortgage-backed securities. By law, a REIT must distribute at least 90% of taxable income to shareholders, which drives the typically-high yields (4-8% for equity REITs, 10-15% for mortgage REITs). REITs trade on major exchanges like regular stocks, letting individual investors get real-estate exposure without buying or managing physical property. Two main flavors: Equity REITs (own buildings, earn rent — O, PLD, AMT, WELL, VICI) and Mortgage REITs / mREITs (own mortgage loans + MBS, earn the spread — AGNC, NLY, STWD, BXMT). Tagged with an emerald "REIT" badge throughout DiviDrip. Our Quality Score uses a relaxed 90% payout cap for REITs (vs the usual 75%) because REIT payouts are correctly measured against AFFO / FFO, not GAAP earnings.

A DiviDrip Stock Modal panel that fires for any flagged REIT and replaces the GAAP-EPS view with the cash-flow view income investors actually use. Shows: (1) FFO per share — Net Income + Depreciation, pulled from yfinance; (2) Annual Dividend; (3) FFO Payout Ratio = dividend ÷ FFO per share; (4) Net Income for context (often negative on a REIT that's perfectly healthy). The panel surfaces a verdict pill — Very Safe (< 70%), Sweet Spot (70-85%), Stretched (85-100%), Risky (> 100%) — plus a plain-English explainer that anchors the number to what it means for the dividend's safety. Critical context: actual AFFO from a REIT's supplemental filing is typically 5-15% lower than FFO (it nets out recurring capex that yfinance can't isolate), so a 79% FFO payout often translates to a 65-75% AFFO payout — still in the sector sweet spot. Use this lens whenever the Dividend Triangle's EPS leg looks weak — it almost always does on REITs, and that signal alone is misleading. See also: AFFO, FFO, Dividend Triangle Score, REIT, Why EPS Lies for REITs.

For a REIT, the only payout ratio that matters is dividend ÷ FFO (or even better, dividend ÷ AFFO). The regular dividend ÷ EPS payout ratio is misleading for REITs because GAAP depreciation drags Net Income down — many healthy REITs report payout ratios over 200% of GAAP EPS while only paying out 60-80% of their actual cash flow. Sector targets: < 70% = very safe (cushion for vacancies, rate hikes, growth); 70-85% = sweet spot (generous to shareholders, keeps a buffer); 85-100% = stretched (covered but tight); > 100% = unsustainable without debt or asset sales. DiviDrip's Quality Score uses a relaxed 90% payout cap for REITs vs. the usual 75% for regular stocks, and the REIT Cash Lens panel shows the live FFO payout ratio with a color-coded verdict pill. Mortgage REITs (mREITs) are evaluated against "distributable income" or "core EPS" instead — FFO is for equity REITs only. See also: AFFO, FFO, REIT Cash Lens.

The annual rate of return YOU personally need this stock to earn before you consider the risk worth taking. Plugged into the Insights tab's Valuation Matrix slider, it directly drives the DDM math: a higher r means the model has to find a CHEAPER entry price to justify buying; a lower r means you're willing to pay UP because you need less return. Guidance: 6-7% = conservative (treating dividend stocks like high-grade bonds); 8% = balanced default (roughly the long-run S&P 500 total return); 10% = market average; 12-15% = aggressive (you want stocks priced cheap enough to beat the market). The slider also adapts to the stock's 5-yr CAGR — if you set r below the company's historical growth, DiviDrip clamps growth DOWN to r − 1% and flags it, so the math always resolves and the result is conservative. See also: DDM, Gordon Constant Growth Model, Two-Stage DDM, Intrinsic Value (Target Buy Price).

Top-line sales — the total dollar amount of products and services a company sold in the period before any costs are subtracted.

The compound annual growth rate of a company's revenue over the trailing three fiscal years. Formula: (Revenue_t ÷ Revenue_t-3)^1/3 − 1, expressed as a percent. Smooths out single-year noise and captures the sustained level of top-line growth in a way that a raw year-over-year number can't.

Why 3 years, not 5 or 10: Three years is short enough that management and product-cycle continuity still hold, but long enough to average out one bad quarter or a lumpy contract-timing swing. Most institutional growth screens use either 3-year or 5-year CAGR; DiviDrip standardises on 3-year for the Capital Analytics engine because a large portion of the non-dividend universe has under 5 years of clean post-IPO revenue history.

Interpretation bands (broad, sector-neutral):

• 25%+ — hypergrowth. Common in early-stage SaaS, AI infrastructure, and disruptive consumer names during their expansion phase.
• 10–25% — healthy compounder. Most Capital Reinvestment Score winners sit here.
• 3–10% — mature. Growth is real but not the primary return driver; look to margins and buybacks for the return math.
• Below 3% — flat to declining. Non-dividend stocks in this band are usually either transitioning to a payer or heading into terminal decline; the Learn guide The Lifecycle of a Stock walks through the specific terminal-decline signals.

How it differs from Operating Momentum: Revenue CAGR measures the LEVEL of growth. Operating Momentum measures whether that growth rate is speeding up or slowing down — the second derivative. A stock can have a fantastic 35% 3-year CAGR while Operating Momentum collapses because the most recent year only grew 18% versus the prior year's 50%. Read the two together, not either one alone.

Where you see it: Capital Analytics tab (shown as an inline metric next to Operating Momentum), the Growth tab quality score (contributes 20 points), and every Learn guide that discusses the fundamental engine behind non-dividend stock returns.

See also: Operating Momentum, Capital Reinvestment Score, CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate), Revenue (Total Revenue), Revenue Growth, Rule of 40.

Year-over-year change in revenue, expressed as a percentage. Sustained revenue growth is a major support for dividend growth.

A DiviDrip-computed score of how steady a company's revenue has been over time. Higher = smoother, more recession-resistant top line. Helpful for identifying defensive dividend payers.

A toggle on the What If? page's Time Machine card that flips the simulator from forward-projection to a backwards historical replay. Instead of compounding an assumed growth rate, it uses REAL monthly Yahoo prices and dividends from the last N years to show what your current shares would have done through actual market conditions — a true backtest. See also "Backtest".

The Item 1A section of every 10-K, where management is legally required to disclose every material risk that could meaningfully hurt the business. Reading these once a year for every holding is the single highest-ROI research habit. DiviDrip categorises each risk row using a 3-level taxonomy (Primary / Secondary / Tertiary) and renders them in the Stock Modal's 10-K / 8-K / Risks tab.

A YoY Disclosure Trend mini-chart at the top of the panel shows how each primary category's row count moved between this year's 10-K and last year's — rising counts (rose) imply management is bracing investors for more risk; falling counts (emerald) suggest something was resolved or downgraded.

The 6 primary categories DiviDrip groups every risk under:

• Operational and Execution — supply chain, manufacturing, key-customer concentration, product launches, inventory, IT systems, attrition / talent.
• External and Systemic — macro / recession, FX, geopolitics, war, pandemics, weather / climate events, broad-market volatility.
• Regulatory and Compliance — tax law changes, antitrust, environmental regs, sector-specific rules (banking, healthcare, energy), litigation, sanctions.
• Financial and Capital — debt covenants, refinancing, credit rating, interest-rate exposure, pension obligations, dilution, share buybacks.
• Technology and Information — cybersecurity / breaches, data privacy laws (GDPR/CCPA), AI disruption, IP theft, platform dependencies (cloud, app stores).
• Governance and Stakeholder — board composition, controlling shareholder, dual-class shares, ESG pressure, activist investors, succession.

Click any category in the trend chart to filter the row list to just that category. Tap the ★ next to the Risk Factors section header to pin the filing to your Watchlist. See also: 10-K, 8-K.

Net Income ÷ Total Assets. Measures how efficiently management turns the assets they have into profit. Higher is better; 5%+ is solid for most industries (banks naturally run lower).

Some funds "pay" you by returning your own money and labeling it a dividend. This lowers your cost basis but isn't real investment income. Common in CEFs and some monthly-pay ETFs. A high-yield fund whose distributions are mostly ROC is essentially a slow self-liquidation.

Net Income ÷ Shareholder Equity. Measures profitability relative to shareholders' invested capital. Above 15% is generally strong. Caution: ROE can be artificially boosted by large debt loads, so always pair with D/E.

How efficiently a company turns every dollar invested in the business into profit, after accounting for its cost of capital. Above 20% = elite (strong moat); 10–20% = solid; 0–10% = mediocre; negative = the company is destroying value. The single best one-number quality check on a business.

A retirement account where you contribute after-tax money, and growth + qualified withdrawals are completely tax-free. Considered the "optimal" home for high-yield dividend stocks because all dividends and DRIP reinvestments grow forever without ever being taxed. Two key rules: contribute earned income only, and withdrawals are tax-free after age 59½ once the account is 5+ years old.

The canonical SaaS / growth-stock efficiency check, popularized by Brad Feld of Foundry Group around 2015 and adopted as the industry standard by Bessemer Venture Partners and most public-market software analysts. A non-dividend company is considered to be scaling efficiently if its revenue growth rate plus its profit margin equals or exceeds 40%.

Math:

• Revenue Growth % = most recent annual year-over-year revenue change.
• Profit Margin % = Free Cash Flow ÷ Revenue (the canonical FCF variant) OR Operating Income ÷ Revenue (the Operating variant).
• Rule of 40 (FCF) = Revenue Growth + FCF Margin
• Rule of 40 (Operating) = Revenue Growth + Operating Margin

Tier interpretation:

• 60+ — Elite. Every point of growth is matched by elite profitability. Rare combination, usually only achieved by dominant compounders.
• 40–60 — Healthy. The canonical pass. Business is scaling without burning capital.
• 30–40 — Borderline. Growth or margin is starting to crack. Watch quarter-over-quarter for a trend.
• 0–30 — Failing. The company is buying growth with money it isn't making.
• Negative — Burning cash. Revenue is contracting AND margins are negative. Existential signal in a high-rate environment.

Why two variants? The FCF variant is the strict SaaS-investor convention — it penalizes companies that report high Operating Income but bleed cash via capex or stock-based-compensation true-ups. The Operating variant is more forgiving for capex-heavy industrials (semiconductors, telecom) where heavy property-and-equipment investment is structural, not a sign of inefficiency. Looking at both side by side often reveals dilution-via-comp stories the headline number hides.

Where you see it: Capital Analytics tab → Section 5c “Rule of 40” card. Both variants display with a threshold bar (40 line marked) and a per-component breakdown so you can see exactly which side (growth or margin) is driving the score. Standalone metric — does NOT feed the Capital Reinvestment Score because Revenue CAGR and Operating Momentum already factor in.

See also: Operating Momentum, Revenue CAGR (3-Year), CFROI (Cash-Flow Return on Invested Capital), Capital Reinvestment Score, Free Cash Flow (FCF).

An index of 500 of the largest U.S. publicly traded companies, weighted by market cap. Used as the default benchmark for "the market." DiviDrip's Growth vs S&P 500 chart shows how a stock has performed relative to it.

Up to 5 server-stored What-If configurations per user, pinned across devices. Save a scenario by giving it a name (e.g. "5y DRIP $200/mo split"); click a pill to reload all settings (changes, presets, DCA, sliders, DRIP years, time machine). Re-saving the same name overwrites the entry; oldest is evicted once you hit 5.

A high-level industry grouping that classifies a company by the broad area of the economy it operates in. DiviDrip uses the standard 11 GICS / Morningstar sectors.

• Technology — Companies that create software, hardware, semiconductors, cloud services, AI, cybersecurity, and other tech products / services.
• Healthcare — Businesses involved in medical care, pharmaceuticals, biotech, medical devices, hospitals, and health insurance.
• Financials — Banks, insurance companies, investment firms, credit card companies, mortgage lenders, and asset managers.
• Consumer Cyclical — Companies that sell non-essential goods / services people buy more during strong economies, like cars, travel, restaurants, and luxury retail.
• Consumer Defensive — Businesses selling everyday necessities people keep buying regardless of the economy, like food, beverages, household products, and discount stores.
• Industrials — Companies tied to manufacturing, transportation, construction, aerospace, machinery, and business services.
• Energy — Oil, gas, pipeline, refining, drilling, and renewable energy production companies.
• Utilities — Providers of electricity, water, natural gas, and power infrastructure; usually stable, income-focused businesses.
• Real Estate — Property owners, REITs, real estate developers, data centers, cell towers, and property management companies.
• Basic Materials — Businesses involved in raw materials such as mining, chemicals, forestry, metals, paper, and agriculture inputs.
• Communication Services — Telecom companies, media businesses, streaming platforms, social media, entertainment, and digital advertising companies.

The Sector Rebalancer (under My Portfolio → Tool Box) helps you weight your portfolio across these 11 sectors against a target allocation.

A DiviDrip tool that compares your current sector allocation to a target (e.g., 20% Tech, 15% Healthcare) and tells you exactly what to buy or sell to bring everything in line — including which specific tickers in your watchlist could fill each gap.

A statistical technique where each company's factor scores are winsorized (capped at the 5th and 95th percentiles) WITHIN its own GICS sector before being combined into a composite. Stops a cross-sector model from declaring "biotech is bad" — instead it asks "is THIS biotech better than its biotech peers?" Critical for any ranking system because biotechs naturally show negative CFROI (no revenue yet), utilities naturally show low momentum (regulated growth), and tech naturally shows extreme P/E ratios. Sector-neutralization isolates the alpha that matters: relative quality within an apples-to-apples peer set. Used throughout DiviDrip's Capital Quality Rank engine to keep the 1–100 scale comparable across sectors. See also: Capital Quality Rank (1–100), Sector, Capital Analytics Composite Score.

The umbrella term Wall Street uses for any tradable financial asset that represents ownership in a company (equity), a loan to a borrower (debt), or a contractual right to a payment stream (derivatives, hybrids). When a fund prospectus says it "invests at least 80% of its net assets in securitized securities", it means the fund holds investment vehicles where the payments come from a pool of underlying loans or assets that have been bundled and sold to investors.

The securities you'll most often encounter inside dividend-fund prospectuses (especially for CLO and securitized-credit funds like JSI, JAAA, JBBB, JEMB):

• Asset-Backed Securities (ABS): Bonds whose payments come from a pool of consumer or business loans — auto loans, credit-card receivables, student loans, equipment leases, royalty streams. Sliced into tranches by risk just like CLOs.
• Collateralized Loan Obligations (CLOs): A specific kind of ABS backed by senior-secured corporate loans. See the dedicated CLO entry for the full layer-cake explanation.
• Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS): Bonds whose payments come from a pool of home-loan mortgages. Two flavors:
  • Agency MBS: Backed and guaranteed by U.S. government-sponsored entities (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Ginnie Mae). Effectively risk-free on credit; only sensitive to interest rates and prepayment speed.
  • Non-Agency MBS: Issued by private banks/lenders without a government guarantee. Higher yields, real default risk if homeowners stop paying.
• Equity Securities: Common and preferred stock — slices of company ownership. The bulk of what most dividend-paying products hold.
• Debt Securities (Bonds): Loans to governments and corporations. See the Bonds entry for the full sub-list (Investment Grade, AAA, BB+, Junk, Perpetual, etc.).
• Hybrid / Convertible Securities: Bonds that can convert into stock under set rules. Pay a coupon like a bond but offer upside like a stock.
• Derivative Securities: Options, futures, swaps, and forwards whose value derives from another asset. See the Derivatives entry.

See also: Bonds, CLO (Collateralized Loan Obligation), Derivatives, Tranches.

A dividend frequency where the company pays out two dividends per year, typically every six months. Most common for European and UK companies, and many ADRs of foreign-domiciled names. See "Dividend Frequency" for the full list of frequencies (Weekly / Monthly / Quarterly / Semi-Annually / Annually).

A 4-option poll (Buying / Holding / Trimming / Selling) that auto-rotates daily around the most-held tickers in the DiviDrip Community. Members vote anonymously; only aggregate percentages are visible. Sentiment percentages also overlay on the Community Dividend Calendar so you can see how the community feels about a stock heading into its ex-dividend date. Voting requires community membership.

A copy-link button (🔗 icon) on each Saved Scenario pill in the What If? simulator. Clicking it copies a shareable URL (/whatif?s=<encoded>) to your clipboard — paste the link in a DM, Reddit, or Twitter and anyone who opens it lands on /whatif with the scenario pre-loaded, no account required. Zero-backend-cost way to share "here's what happens if you DRIP JEPI for 10y" with friends.

The true net change in share count expressed as a yield: (shares retired via buybacks − shares issued via stock-based comp and other dilution) ÷ market cap. Positive Shareholder Yield = the company is actually shrinking the float and returning capital to existing holders. Negative = stock-based compensation is outpacing buybacks and you're being diluted (your slice of the pie is shrinking, even though the total pie may be growing). Often called "net buyback yield" because it nets gross buybacks against dilution — companies that announce huge $5B buyback programmes but issue $5B of stock comp have Shareholder Yield near zero. One of the 4 factors in DiviDrip's Capital Quality Rank (30% weight). Shown alongside the "true_share_float_shrinking" boolean flag on the Capital Analytics tab. See also: Capital Quality Rank, Buyback Yield (legacy term), Shares Outstanding, Float (Float Shares).

One unit of ownership in a company. Buying 10 shares of a stock makes you the proportional owner of 10 shares' worth of the company's assets, voting rights, and future dividends. DiviDrip tracks several share-type distinctions because they each carry different consequences.

Long-Term Shares (LT) — shares held for MORE than 365 days. When you eventually sell them, gains qualify for U.S. federal long-term capital gains rates (0%, 15%, or 20% depending on your income bracket), which are typically much lower than your regular income tax rate. Long-term losses offset long-term gains first when filing taxes. The “more than one year” threshold is strict — a share held exactly 365 days is still short-term.

Short-Term Shares (ST) — shares held for 365 days OR LESS. Gains on these are taxed as ordinary income at your regular bracket (often 22-37% for U.S. filers), so they're typically the most expensive shares to sell at a profit. Short-term losses, however, offset short-term gains first — making them especially valuable for tax-loss harvesting if you have ST gains to offset that year. The Tax Lot Optimizer tags every lot as LT or ST based on the original purchase date so you can see at a glance which shares cross the 1-year mark when.

Fractional Shares — partial shares (e.g. 2.5731 shares of a stock). Modern brokers like Robinhood, Fidelity, and Schwab let you buy them so you can invest exact dollar amounts ($100 instead of “1.97 shares of NVIDIA at $50.76”). Particularly common with DRIP because dividends rarely match a whole-share price exactly. Fractional shares carry full voting rights on a proportional basis and earn dividends proportionally too — own 0.5 shares of a $1/yr dividend payer and you collect 50¢. DiviDrip stores share counts to 4 decimal places so DRIP-driven fractional buys remain accurate.

Whole Shares — non-fractional shares (e.g. 100 shares). The traditional unit, mandatory for some operations like exercising voting rights at most shareholder meetings, transferring shares between brokers (the receiving broker may round down fractional portions), or shorting (you can't short fractional shares). For most retail investing the distinction doesn't matter — your broker will handle it transparently.

Other share-type concepts you might encounter: Restricted Shares (typically employee-comp shares with a vesting schedule before they can be sold), Treasury Shares (shares the company itself has bought back, sitting on its balance sheet, no voting/dividends until reissued), Authorized vs Issued vs Outstanding Shares (Authorized = max corporate charter allows; Issued = actually created; Outstanding = held by external investors right now), and Class A / B / C Shares (different voting power or dividend rules within the same company; e.g. Alphabet's GOOG vs GOOGL). DiviDrip is focused on outstanding shares the public can buy on an exchange.

The total number of a company's shares currently held by all investors — including those held by insiders. Used to calculate market cap and EPS. RELATED METRIC: "Share Float YoY %" tracks the percent change in this number year-over-year. Positive YoY = dilution (the company issued more shares than it bought back; your slice of the pie shrinks). Negative YoY = net buybacks (each existing share now owns a bigger slice). DiviDrip's Capital Allocator Checklist passes a ticker when Share Float YoY ≤ 1.5% — strict enough to flag option-grant-heavy growth names but loose enough to allow normal employee stock plans. See also: Shareholder Yield, Capital Reinvestment Score, Float (Float Shares).

Number of shares sold short divided by average daily volume. Indicates how many days of normal trading it would take to cover all short positions. Above 5 means heavy short interest; potential for a "short squeeze" if the stock rallies.

The single biggest tax fork when you sell. Held one year or less = SHORT-TERM, taxed at your ordinary income rate (up to 37% federal). Held more than one year = LONG-TERM, taxed at the preferential 0%, 15%, or 20% rate. The clock runs per tax lot, not per ticker — one position can hold both ST and LT lots simultaneously. DiviDrip's Multi-Share Sell preview tags every consumed lot ST or LT and splits the estimated gain/loss between the two buckets before you commit. For the full 2025 bracket detail on the long-term side, see the LTCG (Long-Term Capital Gains) entry.

See also: LTCG (Long-Term Capital Gains), Tax Lot, FIFO (First-In, First-Out), HIFO (Highest-In, First-Out), Tax-Loss Harvest, NIIT (Net Investment Income Tax).

A DiviDrip consensus badge that fires on the Stock Modal's Insider & Institutional tab when 3 or more “famous” institutional investors all hold the same ticker — as reported on their most recent Form 13F filings. DiviDrip pulls 1,000 pages (≈1 million rows) of 13-F data each weekend, then buckets every position by ticker and flags multi-holder overlap.

Two tiers:

• Consensus (amber) — 3 to 5 famous holders.
• High-Conviction (emerald) — 6 or more famous holders.

The “famous” roster includes Berkshire Hathaway (Buffett), Pershing Square (Ackman), Renaissance Technologies, Bridgewater Associates, Two Sigma, Citadel, Viking Global, Soros Fund, Scion (Burry), Greenlight (Einhorn), Appaloosa (Tepper), and a handful of other widely-followed managers. Tap any name in the holders table to drill into that filer's full portfolio. The badge is a signal — not advice. Famous managers can be wrong. Use it to surface names worth a closer look, not as a buy trigger. See also: Institutional Holders (Top 13F), Insider Activity (Form 4 Trades).

Sponsored ADRs are issued in cooperation with the foreign company; the company files SEC reports and is subject to U.S. regulations. Unsponsored ADRs are created by U.S. banks without the foreign company's involvement and have less disclosure. Most sizable foreign companies trade as Sponsored ADRs.

A What If? preset / Custom Change action that drops BOTH the price AND dividend of a chosen ticker by a chosen percentage (10-95%). A real-world crash usually triggers a dividend cut alongside the price drop, so the preset models both. The "Top Yielder Stock Crash" preset auto-picks the highest-yielding position in your portfolio. Combine with the Recovery Period subtoggle to model bounce-back rather than permanent craters.

The fuchsia slider in the Time Machine card — sets the expected annual price change from -15% to +15%. Positive = market grows. Negative = market downturn. Applied as a compound annual rate to every position's price over the Time Machine horizon. Pair with Annual Dividend Growth to model different market environments (bull / bear / flat).

A DiviDrip tool that filters the entire database (~4,500 dividend-paying stocks and ETFs) by yield, payout ratio, sector, market cap, P/E, beta, debt, ROIC, FCF margin, dividend tier, frequency, and risk flags (Leveraged / Futures / ADR). Includes pre-built Quick Screens like "Blue Chip Income," "Monthly Payers," "ADRs (Foreign Companies)," etc.

Morningstar's 3×3 grid that classifies a fund by company size (Large / Mid / Small) and investment style (Value / Blend / Growth). Examples: "Large Value" = big established companies trading at low multiples; "Small Growth" = small fast-growing companies. A balanced portfolio usually holds funds across multiple style-box squares.

The wash-sale test for what counts as "the same security." Definitely identical: the same ticker in any of your accounts, a different share class of the same company (GOOG ↔ GOOGL, BRK.A ↔ BRK.B), and options on the same stock. High-risk: ETFs tracking the same index (VOO ↔ SPY ↔ IVV all track the S&P 500). Generally safe swaps: a different index (VOO → QQQ), total-market vs S&P 500 (VOO → VTI), or a direct competitor stock (F → GM). The IRS has never published a bright-line ETF rule — when in doubt, swap into a fund tracking a different index and wait out the 30 days. See also: Wash Sale, Tax-Loss Harvest.

DiviDrip's yield band label. The ideal range for income-focused investors like retirees. Moderate risk, generally stable — check the payout ratio. Often mature industries (utilities, real estate, telecom). Examples: Verizon, big oil, AT&T.

A shareholder protection — if a controlling shareholder sells their stake, minority shareholders have the right to "tag along" and sell at the same price under the same terms. In Brazilian dual-class ADRs, common (ON) shares get 100% tag-along rights; preferred (PN) shares get 80%.

A composite of the Altman Z-Score (bankruptcy-risk model) and the Beneish M-Score (earnings-manipulation screen). Penalises companies whose balance sheets are in distress or whose accounting looks too good to be true. Tail-Risk does NOT predict short-term stock moves — it filters out names with an above-average chance of going to zero or suffering 80%+ drawdowns from a fraud / restatement / bankruptcy event. One of the 4 factors in DiviDrip's Capital Quality Rank (20% weight); a strong Tail-Risk hit caps the composite at 80% of unflagged value regardless of how strong the other 3 factors look. Shown as the "Forensic Diagnostics" panel on the Capital Analytics tab, listing the actual Altman Z value, Beneish M flag status, and resulting penalty multiplier. See also: Altman Z-Score, Beneish M-Score, Capital Quality Rank (1–100).

Total Shareholder Equity − Goodwill − Other Intangible Assets. The "hard" net asset value of the company — what shareholders would theoretically own if every intangible asset (acquisition goodwill, brand names, patents, customer lists) were marked to zero. A more conservative balance-sheet floor than regular Book Value. Negative tangible book is common for serial acquirers (Verizon, AT&T, some media companies after years of M&A) — it means the entire equity cushion exists only via goodwill and intangibles that could be written down. For dividend safety, prefer companies whose Tangible Book is comfortably positive AND growing. Critical metric for banks and insurers, where regulators use tangible book in stress tests. See also: Goodwill, Book Value, Net Debt.

The Price-to-Operating-Cash-Flow multiple chosen by the user as their valuation anchor in the Non-Dividend Valuation Matrix's OCF Multiplier model. Defines how many dollars the user is willing to pay per dollar of trailing operating cash flow per share. The model multiplies this target by the company's 3-year average OCF per share to land at a target buy price. Industry sector averages: stable industrials trade at 8–12x P/OCF, quality compounders 12–18x, high-growth tech 18–25x. Slide LEFT (low multiple) for a conservative entry with a deeper margin of safety; slide RIGHT to pay a premium typical for dominant industry leaders or hyper-growth tech where reinvestment opportunities justify a higher cash-flow multiple. See also: OCF (Operating Cash Flow), Owner Earnings Multiplier, Cash from Operations (CFO), Two-Stage FCFE Valuation.

Where Wall Street analysts collectively expect the stock to trade in the next 12 months. DiviDrip shows the high, mean (consensus), and low targets. Use them as one signal among many — analysts can be biased and slow to update.

A discrete batch of shares purchased on a specific date at a specific price. The DiviDrip Portfolio supports multiple tax lots per ticker — every Buy creates a new lot, every Sell consumes from existing lots. Each lot tracks its own purchase date, cost basis, and term (long-term vs short-term) so the Tax Lot Optimizer can identify exactly which lots offer tax-loss harvest opportunities. Robinhood CSV imports automatically split positions into the same FIFO lots that Robinhood itself tracks.

A Schwab-style smart algorithm that ranks every tax lot from most to least tax-favorable, then consumes them in strict priority order: (1) short-term losses, largest first — they offset ordinary income; (2) long-term losses, largest first; (3) long-term gains, smallest first — taxed at the preferential 0/15/20% rate; (4) short-term gains, smallest first — taxed at your full ordinary rate, so they go last. Pick it in DiviDrip's Multi-Share Sell widget (Portfolio page or Stock Modal → My Portfolio) for the most tax-favorable result on most sales. See also: FIFO, HIFO, Tax Lot.

The reduced rate of Foreign Withholding Tax a foreign government applies to dividends paid to U.S. portfolio investors, set by the bilateral income-tax treaty between that country and the U.S. The treaty rate is almost always lower than the country's domestic statutory rate (e.g. Switzerland's domestic rate is 35% but the U.S. treaty rate also lands at 35% with relief filed separately; France domestic 25-30% → treaty 12.8% for portfolio dividends; UK domestic 0% so treaty 0%; Germany domestic ~26% → treaty 26.375% including solidarity surcharge). DiviDrip uses the treaty rate (sourced from IRS Pub 901) when calculating ADR Tax Drag and the Stock Modal's ADR Withholding-Tax Estimator card — these are the rates a typical U.S. retail investor actually pays. Sometimes brokers withhold at a higher non-treaty rate by default (because the W-8BEN treaty-claim form is missing on the account); if your 1099-DIV box 7 shows more withheld than DiviDrip's estimate, file a W-8BEN with your broker. See also: Foreign Withholding Tax (WHT), Foreign Tax Credit (FTC) / Form 1116, ADR, ADR Tax Drag.

Selling a lot with an unrealized loss to lock in a capital loss for tax purposes. The realized loss offsets capital gains dollar-for-dollar (long-term losses offset long-term gains first, short-term losses offset short-term gains first), and any remaining loss can offset up to $3,000 of ordinary income per year (US federal rules). The Tax Lot Optimizer surfaces every loss-eligible lot in your portfolio and totals up the harvestable amount in each tax bucket. Always confirm specific moves with a tax pro — wash-sale rules, qualified-dividend treatment, and state taxes can all change the math.

See "Dividend Tier (King / Aristocrat / Achiever)" — DiviDrip's shorthand for how many consecutive years a stock has raised its dividend.

A toggle on every watchlist row that expands an orange info bar showing what a $1,000 investment in that ticker, made exactly 1 year ago with full DRIP turned on, would be worth today. Reports the current value of the $1,000 stake, the share count then vs now, total cash dividends received, total DRIP reinvestments, forward annual dividend income, yield on cost, and head-to-head returns vs SPY / SCHD / VYM benchmarks (also DRIP-on, same window). Closes with a plain-English Verdict pill — Great Buy / Good Buy / Lukewarm / Underperformed / Bad Buy — that summarises whether the past year actually beat the broad market. Cached server-side for 7 days and pre-warmed weekly so the bar opens instantly. Don't confuse this with the What-If "Time Machine" horizon slider — they're different features that happen to share a name.

The horizon setting on the What If? page — pick 1, 5, 10, 20, or 30 years. Every simulated change (DCA, DRIP, price + dividend growth, crashes, cuts) is compounded over that many years, and the Now vs What-If result cards both show projected end-of-horizon state. The Time Machine is always active — even a "do nothing" scenario projects your current portfolio forward at the chosen growth rate.

The plain-English summary pill on every Watchlist Time Machine bar. Compares your $1,000 stake's 1-year DRIP-on total return against SPY's 1-year DRIP-on total return over the same window. Five tiers: Great Buy = made money AND beat SPY by 5%+. Good Buy = made money AND matched or beat SPY. Lukewarm = made money but lagged SPY by less than 5%. Underperformed = made money but lagged SPY by 5% or more (the index would have been notably better). Bad Buy = lost money over the past year (your $1,000 with DRIP on is now worth less than $1,000). The verdict is meant as a quick sanity check, not a sell signal — a 1-year window is short and many quality dividend stocks lag SPY in any given year while still being long-term winners.

A What If? Quick Scenario preset (AlertTriangle icon) that auto-picks the highest-yielding position in your effective portfolio and applies a 10-95% crash to BOTH its price and dividend simultaneously. Pair with the Recovery Period subtoggle to model bounce-back over 3/5/10 years. Simulates the common "chase yield, get crushed" scenario — e.g., a high-yield CEF or BDC that blows up and recovers slowly over the following years.

Cash plus short-term investments on the balance sheet. A buffer for downturns and a war chest for buybacks, dividends, or acquisitions. Net cash position = Total Cash − Total Debt. Companies with strong net cash positions can sustain dividends through tough quarters without needing to refinance.

Sum of all interest-bearing borrowings (short-term and long-term loans, bonds, capitalised lease obligations). Compare to Total Cash for net cash position, and to Market Cap or Equity for leverage scale. Rising debt during a downturn is often the first sign of dividend trouble.

The total dollar dividend a stock actually paid out over the LAST 12 months — the verified historical figure, not the expected one. Compare against the Forward Dividend Rate (what the company has signalled for the next 12 months) to gauge dividend momentum. Forward > Trailing means the company has hiked its dividend; Forward < Trailing means it has cut. Both are USD-normalised so cross-market comparisons (e.g., a UK ADR paying in pence vs a US name paying in dollars) work apples-to-apples. The dollar gap between the two is the "Dividend Policy Delta" — see that entry for how DiviDrip uses it in the Quality Score and the Stock Modal banner.

P/E ratio based on the past 12 months of actual earnings. The most common P/E figure quoted on financial sites. Compare against Forward P/E to see whether analysts expect earnings to rise or fall.

Pronounced "tronsh" (it's the French word for "slice"). When a CLO, ABS, or MBS is built, the underlying pool of loans is sliced into layers that pay investors at DIFFERENT priority levels — like a layer cake. Cash from the underlying loans flows down through the cake top-first: senior tranches at the top get paid first and are therefore the safest (and earn the lowest yield); mezzanine tranches sit in the middle (moderate risk, moderate yield); equity tranches at the bottom get paid last and absorb the FIRST losses if loans in the pool go bad — so they earn the HIGHEST potential yield as compensation. This structure is called a "waterfall". A typical CLO might be sliced into 6-7 tranches: AAA (senior), AA, A, BBB, BB, B, and Equity. Funds like JAAA target ONLY the top AAA slice — the safest layer of the cake. Funds like JBBB target slightly lower tranches (BBB and up) for more yield. The riskiest tranche of any deal — the equity slice — is rarely sold to retail and usually held by the CLO manager themselves.

Shorthand for the Dividend Triangle — see "Dividend Triangle" for the full definition. When you hear someone on DiviDrip ask "what does the Triangle say?" they're asking about the 3-axis radar of Revenue, EPS, and Dividend 5-year CAGRs. See: Dividend Triangle, Triangle Score, Why this score?, Dividend Trap.

A single 0–100 number summarizing the Dividend Triangle. Each leg (Revenue, EPS, Dividend CAGR) is normalized to a 0–100 axis (−5% CAGR → 0, 0% → 40, +15% → 100, linear between), and the Triangle Score is the average of whatever legs have valid data. 75+ = strong triangle, 60–74 = healthy, 45–59 = mixed signals, 30–44 = weak fundamentals, below 30 = high risk of cut. Read it alongside the Dividend Quality Score: Quality answers "how attractive is the payout?" and Triangle answers "are the underlying growth trends actually pointing in the right direction?". After you visit a stock's Triangle tab once, the score caches for 24 hours and surfaces as a small ▲ chip directly on that stock's row in the Screener and Watchlist tables — emerald for 70+, sky for 50-69, amber for 35-49, rose with a warning icon for under 35 or trap-flagged. Click the chip to jump straight to the full radar.

A rolling 12-month window ending at the most recent quarter, used when a stock doesn't have enough multi-year history for a true 5-year CAGR. Example: a company that IPO'd 18 months ago has plenty of quarterly data but no 5-year history — DiviDrip's Triangle Score will fall back to the TTM growth rate from the cached FinImpulse / Yahoo fundamentals (the same number you see as "EPS Growth (CAGR) 11.75%" on the Stock Metrics tab) and tag the leg with an "n=1yr CAGR · TTM" footnote so you know the window is short. TTM is a one-year snapshot — it's informative but more volatile than a 5-year CAGR, especially for cyclical businesses. Read it alongside the Quality Score, which weights Longevity (King 50+ years, Aristocrat 25+, Achiever 10+) so a TTM-only ticker can't score above Healthy on the Triangle without other signals supporting it.

The Dividend Discount Model variant for stocks growing dividends FAST today (5-yr CAGR > 6%) but unable to sustain that pace forever. Stage 1: discount each year's projected dividend back to today at the current high-growth rate for a short runway — 5 years if CAGR ≤ 12%, 3 years if ≤ 20%, 2 years if higher (the faster the growth, the shorter the leash). Stage 2: assume a permanent slowdown to ~3.5%/yr (long-run inflation + GDP floor) and compute the terminal value via the simple Gordon model, then discount THAT back to today. The intrinsic value is Stage 1 + Stage 2. Used by the Insights Valuation Matrix for fast-growing dividend payers like COST, MA, V, NVDA. Caveat: even Two-Stage DDM only values the dividend stream — for mega-cap compounders most of the long-run total return comes from share-price appreciation, which DDM can't see, so "Overvalued" by Two-Stage DDM is common and not necessarily a sell signal. See also: DDM, Gordon Constant Growth Model, Required Rate of Return, Intrinsic Value, Overvalued (by DDM).

The non-dividend counterpart to the Two-Stage DDM. A discounted-cash-flow model that projects 5 years of Free Cash Flow to Equity (FCFE) growth at the company's recent cash-flow CAGR (Stage 1), then caps off at a terminal value growing at long-run inflation + GDP ~3.5%/yr (Stage 2). Stage 1 + Stage 2 discounted to today = the target buy price. Best fit for established non-dividend companies whose growth is decelerating but not flat — companies like NFLX, GOOG, BRK.B. DiviDrip's Non-Dividend Valuation Matrix swaps automatically to the Owner Earnings Multiplier when the required return drops below the company's growth rate (the FCFE math breaks down there, producing infinite fair value). Powers the "Target Buy" price and "Vs Market %" overvalued/undervalued verdict on the Capital Analytics tab. See also: FCFE (Free Cash Flow to Equity), Owner Earnings Multiplier, Two-Stage DDM, Required Rate of Return.

The orange "Underperformed" pill on a Watchlist Time Machine bar means: your $1,000 stake (with DRIP on) made money over the past year, but it lagged SPY by 5% or more over the same window. The S&P 500 would have produced a notably better return. It does NOT mean the stock is bad — many quality dividend names underperform SPY in any given year while still being excellent long-term holdings (the dividend growth and lower drawdowns matter more on a 5-10 year view than a single trailing year). Use it as a prompt to check the dividend story — is the income still growing? is the payout safe? — before drawing any conclusions. See "Time Machine Verdict" for the full set of pills (Great Buy / Good Buy / Lukewarm / Underperformed / Bad Buy).

The Insights tab's Valuation Matrix labels a stock "Undervalued" when the live market price is more than 5% below the DDM target buy (intrinsic value). It means the dividend stream alone — given your required rate of return — already justifies the price; whatever upside the company produces in capital appreciation, brand value, or growth is "free" on top. IMPORTANT: undervalued by DDM is NOT a guaranteed buy signal. DDM only values the dividend, ignoring valuation multiples (P/E), debt loads, sector trends, and the actual quality of the underlying business — a struggling REIT or BDC can show "Undervalued" by DDM right up until they cut the dividend. Use it as a sanity check, not a green light: pair with the Triangle Score, payout-ratio safety, and your own due diligence. See also: Overvalued (by DDM), DDM, Intrinsic Value (Target Buy Price), Required Rate of Return.

A label used by the Kings / Aristocrats / Achievers Undervaluation Heatmap pages when a stock's composite score lands in the deep-emerald end of the diverging color scale. The composite blends three quantitative factors: current TTM yield vs its own 3-year mean (40%, structural cheapness), a beta-adjusted 30-day dislocation vs the stock's SPDR sector ETF (35%, tactical timing), and free-cash-flow dividend coverage (25%, safety). Green fires only when all three lenses agree — the stock is structurally cheap on its OWN yield history AND technically oversold vs its sector AND the dividend is covered by real cash. Different from "Undervalued (by DDM)" — DDM values the dividend stream alone against your required rate of return; the Heatmap composite adds a timing signal and a safety veto. Two hard overrides can DEMOTE a name that would otherwise show green: (1) dividend is not covered by free cash flow, (2) TTM yield is ≥ 2.5× its own 3-year mean (a distress signal, not a bargain — the yield spiked because the price collapsed). IMPORTANT: green is a screen, not a buy signal. Always confirm with the Triangle Score, payout-ratio safety, and your own due diligence. See also: Overvalued / Trap (Heatmap Composite), Chowder Score, TTM, FCF, Beta.

An ADR created by a U.S. bank without the foreign company's involvement, with limited SEC disclosure. Generally lower-quality and less liquid than Sponsored ADRs. See the full entry under "Sponsored ADR / Unsponsored ADR" in the S section.

A Stock Screener dropdown that surfaces dividend-payers whose NEXT ex-dividend date falls within a chosen forward window. Five cumulative options: Within 7 days (~440 names — drop everything if you want this paycheck), Within 15 days (~770 names — buy this fortnight), Within 30 days (~1,370 names — covers monthlies + most early-cycle quarterlies), Within 60 days (~3,100 names — broader planning view), Within 95 days (~3,340 names — covers a full quarterly cycle so EVERY quarterly + monthly + weekly stock shows up at least once, with a 5-day buffer). Pair with the Yield, Quality, and Sector filters to find quality income that pays soon. Stock counts vary slightly day-to-day as ex-div dates roll past.

A green checkmark badge that appears next to a DiviDrip Community member's handle on a public watchlist ticker. It means they imported a CSV from their brokerage in the last 90 days AND that ticker was present in the import. It does NOT mean DiviDrip audited their holdings — we never see your brokerage login or connect to your bank. It's a community trust signal: this member has actually opened a lot for the stock they're recommending, not just typed in a name.

A legal workaround that allows foreign investors to hold economic exposure to Chinese businesses in restricted industries (internet, education, media) even though direct foreign ownership is prohibited by Chinese law. Investors technically own shares in a Cayman-Islands shell company that holds contracts giving it the economic rights to a mainland Chinese operating entity — it is NOT equity ownership in the operating business. Every major Chinese ADR (Alibaba, JD, Baidu, Pinduoduo, Bilibili) uses a VIE structure. VIEs have never been explicitly ruled illegal by Chinese authorities but they have also never been explicitly ratified, which makes them regulatory-tail risk that no forensic score can capture. In the 2021 education crackdown, VIE-based ADRs like TAL and EDU were effectively neutered by regulation, and US shareholders had no legal recourse. Practical takeaway: size Chinese-VIE positions at 1-2% max per name, cap total Chinese-ADR exposure at 5-10% of the equity book, and prefer names with an existing dual primary listing in Hong Kong as a fallback path.

How many shares of a stock changed hands on a given day. High volume = liquid, easy to buy or sell without moving the price. Low volume = wider bid/ask spreads and bigger price moves on small orders.

Market Cap calculated using the 5-day Volume-Weighted Average Price (VWAP) instead of the single closing price. VWAP weights each price by the volume traded at that price, so a quiet midday tick counts less than a heavy opening trade. Smoothing across 5 sessions makes the figure resilient to single-day spikes (earnings whipsaws, thin-volume opens, news pops) — exactly the kind of noise that would otherwise jerk a Capital Analytics ranking around. DiviDrip uses the 5-day VWAP Market Cap as the denominator in Shareholder Yield (buybacks ÷ market cap) and as the size anchor inside the non-dividend Capital Reinvestment Score, so the ranking reflects sustained valuation rather than a single closing fluke. See also: Capital Reinvestment Score, Shareholder Yield, Volume.

An IRS rule that disallows a capital-loss deduction if you buy the same (or a substantially identical) security within 30 days BEFORE or AFTER selling it at a loss — a 61-day danger window with the sale date in the middle. The disallowed loss isn't gone forever: it gets added to the new shares' cost basis (deferred) — UNLESS the repurchase happens inside an IRA, where it's permanently destroyed. Three common traps: quick re-entry after a harvest ("buying the dip" you just sold), DRIP auto-reinvestment landing inside the window, and re-buying in a different account — the rule applies across ALL your accounts, including a spouse's. Safe re-buy = Day 31 after the sale (calendar days). DiviDrip's Multi-Share Sell shows a wash-sale warning whenever a sell realizes a loss. See also: Substantially Identical, Tax-Loss Harvest, DRIP.

A DiviDrip view (logged-in users) of every ticker you have starred — without owning shares. Use it to follow potential buys, monitor ex-div dates, and read inline news for stocks on your radar.

Compact "why on radar" chips that appear next to a stock's Tier and Quality badges ON THE WATCHLIST VIEW ONLY (kept noise-free elsewhere). Two chip types: "Ex-div in Xd" (sky blue, fires when next ex-dividend date is ≤7 days away) and "Near 52w low" (violet, fires when current price is within 5% of the 52-week low). The existing CUT/RAISE/STREAK chips and Quality badge already cover the other reason-to-act signals, so these two fill the remaining gaps. See "Ex-Div Soon" and "Near 52-Week Low" for the individual entries.

A summary card that sits at the top of the Watchlist view (visible when your Watchlist has 1+ tickers). At-a-glance facts: Avg Quality Score with the best & worst tickers (clickable), Yield Range (low → high with tickers on each end), Top Sectors as horizontal bars, and a list of every ticker with an Ex-Div date in the next 7 days. When any watched ticker has flagged a Recent Hike or Recent Cut, additional boxes appear below listing those. The "Compare Quality" button on the card opens the Compare Quality modal — see that entry. Designed to turn the Watchlist from a passive list into an actionable dashboard so you spot opportunities and risks the moment you open the page.

A dividend frequency where the company pays out 52 dividends per year — one every week. Very rare and almost always associated with newer leveraged or options-income ETFs (some YieldMax-style funds, single-stock derivatives ETFs). Almost never seen for individual stocks. See "Dividend Frequency" for the full list of frequencies (Weekly / Monthly / Quarterly / Semi-Annually / Annually).

A DiviDrip page (/whatif) that lets you run hypothetical scenarios on top of your real portfolio — without touching a single share. Supports: Quick Scenario presets (boost top yielder, swap riskiest for a King, 2× best performer, DRIP for 5y, cut top yielder 50%, crash top yielder), Add/Remove positions, Custom Changes (modify, replace, crash, dividend cut — each with optional Recovery Period), DCA preset ($/mo across selected tickers, Each or Split mode), Time Machine (1/5/10/20/30 years), annual dividend growth + stock price sliders, DRIP toggle, Reverse Mode (historical backtest), Saved Scenarios, and Share Scenario links. Renders Now vs What-If side-by-side metric cards, an income projection line chart, two sector pies, and a simulated holdings table.

GAAP accounting forces every company to depreciate the value of long-lived physical assets — for a REIT that means writing down the buildings every year as if they were getting worn out, even though commercial real estate typically appreciates. The depreciation is a non-cash expense (no money actually leaves the company) but it slams Net Income and therefore EPS. A textbook example is PINE (Alpine Income Property Trust): its GAAP EPS is mildly negative, yet its actual cash from operations easily covers a $1.20 annual dividend, because $26M+ of "depreciation" was on paper. This is why the Dividend Triangle's EPS leg can paint a misleading "weak" picture for fundamentally healthy REITs, and why DiviDrip puts a REIT Cash Lens panel on the Stock Modal for any flagged REIT — it strips out the depreciation noise (FFO = NI + D&A) and shows you the REIT-native payout ratio income investors actually use. The bottom line: when evaluating a REIT, use FFO/AFFO payout ratio — NOT EPS payout ratio. See also: AFFO, FFO, REIT Cash Lens, REIT Payout Ratio.

A collapsible panel of 1–3 plain-English bullets that explain exactly why a stock got the score it did, generated from the cached fundamentals at score-compute time (no extra fetches, no AI). Each bullet is one of four tones — emerald positive (e.g. "Revenue is compounding 3× faster than the dividend — plenty of room for future hikes"), amber caution ("EPS is lagging the dividend by 5 percentage points — payout ratio will creep up"), rose negative ("Payout ratio is 142% — paying out more than the company earns"), or sky info ("This is an ETF, the Triangle reflects only the fund's distribution growth"). Rules are evaluated in priority order and capped at 3 entries so the panel stays scannable. The narrative fires from cached fields like Payout Ratio, ROIC, FCF Margin, Debt/Equity, Revenue Stability, and ROE — see those glossary entries for what each one actually measures. Two surfaces use this engine: (1) the **Triangle pages** show a Triangle-tuned narrative below the score hero, and (2) the **Stock Modal → Stock Metrics tab** opens with a Quality-Score-tuned narrative at the top ("Quality Score is 55 (Healthy) because: payout 65% comfortable, ROIC 39% strong, D/E 1.40 manageable, 64+ yr streak"). Both panels are open by default but collapse with one click.

Current Yield = annualized dividend ÷ today's price. Forward Yield = expected next-12-months dividend ÷ today's price. Trailing Yield = past-12-months dividend ÷ today's price. They're usually similar; differ most when a stock recently raised, cut, or paid a special dividend.

A stock with a misleadingly attractive dividend yield. The yield looks high not because the company is healthy, but because the share price keeps falling — every quarter NAV slips, the price drops further on the ex-dividend date, and it never recovers. The dividend itself is at risk of being cut. Common warning signs: payout ratio above 100%, declining revenue and earnings, rising debt, and a chart that has been steadily lower for a year or more. Anything yielding 11%+ outside of REITs and BDCs deserves a hard second look.

The dividend yield calculated against your original cost basis instead of today's price. Example: if you bought a stock at $50 paying $2/share annually (4% yield) and the dividend has since grown to $4/share, your YoC is now 8%, even if the current yield to a new buyer is much lower. YoC tracks how good the original purchase has gotten over time, which is the heart of dividend-growth investing.

Comparing a metric this year to the same metric one year ago — revealed as a percentage change. YoY smooths out seasonal noise (a retailer's Q4 vs Q4, not Q4 vs Q1) and lets you instantly see whether a business is growing, flat, or shrinking on a 12-month horizon. YoY shows up across DiviDrip as Revenue YoY, EPS YoY, FFO YoY (on the REIT Cash Lens), and dividend YoY. Negative YoY isn't automatically bad — it can mean an investment year or a tough comparison — but several quarters of negative YoY in a row is a warning that the engine driving the dividend may be shrinking. See also: CAGR (a smoother multi-year version of the same idea).

The simplest variant of the Dividend Discount Model (DDM). Used by the Insights Valuation Matrix when the asset has a FIXED dividend that never changes — preferred shares, baby bonds, depositary shares, and other fixed-coupon securities. Math: Price = D / r. Example: a preferred that pays $1.50/yr forever and you want a 7.5% return should cost $20 ($1.50 ÷ 0.075). If the live market price is below $20 the income alone justifies the buy; above $20 you're overpaying for the same fixed stream. Call risk matters too — if the issuer can call the security at par on a known date, your effective return drops if you bought above par. See also: DDM, Preferred Shares, Baby Bond, Par Value, Coupon Rate, Call Risk.