1 · Portfolio

Your portfolio is the spine of DiviDrip. Every projection, every payout reminder, every yield-on-cost calculation reads from the lots and cash transactions you log here.

1.1Adding your first stock

1. From the top of any page, type the ticker (e.g. JEPI) into the Search ticker or name field — matches appear in the stock table as you type.
2. Click the matching row to open the Stock Modal.
3. Inside the modal, switch to the My Portfolio tab. This is where buys from your broker get logged.
4. Enter the lot details:
   • Shares — fractional allowed, four decimals (e.g. 15.4382).
   • Cost basis per share — what you actually paid, not today's price. Used for gain/loss math.
   • Purchase date — defaults to today; backdating is fine for historical lots.
   • Is this a DRIP buy? — defaults to No. Flip to Yes only if these shares came from a reinvested dividend (no cash leaves your account, no contribution counted). For a regular broker buy, leave it on No.
   • Cash source (only shown when DRIP = No) — Outside = fresh outside money (counts as a contribution), Inside = pay with portfolio cash you already have (sale proceeds or unreinvested dividends), Split = some of each.
5. Save the lot. The stock now appears in your Portfolio table and is auto-tracked by the live price WebSocket.

1.2Logging a DRIP buy

When a dividend reinvests into new shares, that's a DRIP. There are three ways to log one:

• At the time of the buy — when you're entering the lot on the Stock Modal's My Portfolio tab, flip the Is this a DRIP buy? toggle to Yes. The Cash source picker disappears (no cash is deducted, no contribution recorded) and the lot is filed as a DRIP buy.
• From the payout reminder — when a payout reminder card appears under a portfolio stock, click Add DRIP Buy, enter the shares your broker bought + the per-share price, and save. The new shares fold into your position and the cash dividend is logged automatically.
• Forgot to mark it as DRIP at buy-time? No problem — on the Portfolio page, find the ticker's row and click Show Shares. Each share-lot row carries a small hollow water-drop. Click it and it fills in to — that lot is now tagged as a DRIP buy. Click the solid drop again to flip it back to a regular buy. The icon matches the header brand mark next to “DRIP, what it means for your Portfolio.”

1.3Cash transactions

The Cash Balance ribbon lives inside the Capital Tracker card on the Portfolio page and shows your current cash total. It has five action buttons — each one toggles its own form open or closed (click the same button again to close it):

• Add Outside — fresh outside money you've deposited from your bank/broker. This counts toward Total Contributions on the Capital Tracker (it's your real out-of-pocket).
• Add Inside — cash that came from inside the portfolio (sale proceeds or a cash dividend you didn't reinvest). This does NOT count as a contribution.
• Withdraw Outside — pulling principal back out. Reduces Net Contributions on the Capital Tracker.
• Withdraw Inside — drawing down inside cash (dividends or sale proceeds). Does not reduce Net Contributions — it's portfolio-generated money leaving the account.
• Remove — for fixing typos / mis-entered cash without it counting as a withdrawal. Removes from Outside, Inside, or a Split of both (an extra Source toggle appears inside the form, with a per-side amount field when Split is selected).

1.4Sell / remove a lot

When your broker actually sells shares, mirror it here so DiviDrip's cost-basis math stays correct. On the Portfolio page, find the ticker's row and click Show Shares to expand the lots. Each lot row has two action buttons — Sell Shares (records the sale at a price + date) and Remove from Portfolio (delete a mis-entered lot, no sale recorded). DiviDrip never auto-FIFOs your sells — you choose which lot to close.

1.5Spreadsheet export

At the top of the My Portfolio card is a Google / Excel Sheet button. Clicking it opens a small confirm modal — choose Yes, download to save a pre-filled .xlsx of your portfolio (positions, lots, cash, income concentration, trailing-12 income), or No / the close button / click outside the modal to cancel. After a successful download, a toast suggests uploading the file to Google Drive so you can share it with friends.

2 · Watchlist

The Watchlist is for tickers you're considering, watching for an ex-div opportunity, or just tracking out of curiosity. Doesn't affect your portfolio math at all.

2.1Adding a stock to your watchlist

There are two places to add a watchlist star:

• From the main stock table — every row has a ☆ star in front of the ticker. Click it to add (filled = on your watchlist); click again to remove. Portfolio-page rows are the exception — those rows don't carry a star, by design, to save horizontal space.
• From inside the Stock Modal — click the ★ Watch star at the top of the modal. The label flips to Watching when the ticker is on your list; click again to remove.

2.2Watchlist Radar chips

On the Watchlist page each row carries a strip of decision-layer chips:

• Ex-Div countdown — a sky-blue chip reading “Ex-div in 4d” (or “Ex-div today” / “Ex-div tomorrow”). Only shows when the ex-dividend date is within the next 7 days.
• Trending — orange flame chip reading “Trending”. Surfaces when DiviDrip's community-signal feed lists the ticker as being added to many watchlists across the platform.
• High Yield — appears at ≥ 8% yield (typical band for BDCs, REITs, covered-call ETFs); flips to a rose-coloured “Very high yield” chip above 15% as a distribution-risk warning.
• 52W levels — violet “Near 52w low” chip when price is within 5% of the 52-week low; amber “Near 52w high” chip when within 3% of the 52-week high.
• Income Impact — teal “$X/mo per $1k” chip showing the cash flow per $1,000 invested at the current yield. Hover the chip for a full $1k / $10k / $100k breakdown.
• 5Y YoC — fuchsia chip projecting yield-on-cost 5 years out using the stock's 5-year dividend CAGR (3-year fallback). Only renders when the projection is at least 1.25× the current yield.

2.3Pinned Comparisons (saved face-offs)

Find a face-off you keep coming back to? Open Compare with both tickers → click 📌 Pin pair. The pair now appears on your Watchlist tab as a mini-card with live yields. Up to 15 pins, each with an optional 1-line memo (“watching post-earnings drop”). Sort by recent / largest yield gap / alphabetical.

3 · Browsing Stocks

Most of DiviDrip's data is free to view without an account. Sign-in is only needed for the personal-data features (portfolio + watchlist + pins + journal).

3.1The main stock table

• Lands on the dashboard by default. To return here from any other page, click the DiviDrip wordmark or logo image in the top header.
• Default sort is alphabetical by ticker. Sortable column headers: Price · Yield · Div/Yr · Payout (payout frequency — monthly/quarterly/etc) · 1 Mo · 6 Mo · 1 Yr. Click any header to cycle the sort direction.
• Type-ahead search at the top narrows the universe to matching tickers/names as you type.
• Every row has a ★ star in front for one-click watchlist add/remove (see section 2).

3.2The Stock Modal — every tab

Click any row in the main table to open the Stock Modal. Tabs in order from left to right (swipe-able on mobile):

• Dividend Info — current yield, ex-div date, pay date, dividend rate, frequency, recent payout history.
• Stock Metrics — price, market cap, sector, classification chips (ETF / CEF / BDC / REIT / ADR), quality flags.
• Insights — quality score, sector hint, narrative explanations of what the metrics mean.
• Today — today's intraday price chart with pre-market prints and a compare-to-yesterday ghost line.
• Div Growth — historical dividend growth (1y/3y/5y CAGR + bar chart of payouts).
• Triangle — opens the per-stock Dividend Triangle (revenue × EPS × dividend growth) for this ticker.
• My Portfolio — where you enter buys / DRIP buys / view your lots in this ticker.
• Journal — your notes, reviews, and thesis entries tagged to this ticker.
• Yield History — monthly yield-history line for the last few years.
• News — recent headlines for this ticker.
• DRIP Calc — 5y / 10y / 20y reinvestment projection at this ticker's CAGR, with a tax-rate input box (enter any non-negative number).

3.3Screener (deep filtering)

The Screener has its own dedicated page. The entry point is the small blue funnel icon labelled Screener (or Stock Screener on desktop). It appears below the top header, near the top of the page, in the toolbar row alongside the Search field and the Challenge dropdown. It shows on most every page — the Screener page itself and the three Challenge pages (Kings / Aristocrats / Achievers) are the only places it's hidden.

30+ filter criteria — yield bands, market cap, sector, tier, classification (ETF / CEF / BDC / REIT / ADR), payout frequency, and quality flags — combined with AND logic.

The screener results table also defaults to alphabetical and is sortable by: Price · Yield · Div/Yr · Payout · Quality (quality badges) · 1 MO · 1 YR.

3.4Badge Key — decoding every row badge

The stock table rows are dense with badges and abbreviations — tier crowns (King / Aristocrat / Achiever), classification chips (CEF / BDC / REIT / ADR / LEVERAGED / FUTURES), action chips (CUT, RAISE, streak flame), and a YIELD TRAP detector. To decode any of them, click the small Badge Key button (key icon + amber accent + chevron). It opens a popover with every badge the app uses, what it means, and tap-to-pin so the badges you look up most stay at the very top of the list.

The Badge Key button lives in the toolbar row of most every page — on the dashboard it sits to the right of the Challenge dropdown; on the Screener and the Challenge pages it sits in the same toolbar; on the Stock Modal small "?" helper icons next to mystery badges (LEVERAGED, CEF, BDC, etc.) jump you straight to that row inside the same key. Tap below to try it live:

3.5Challenges — Kings, Aristocrats & Achievers

The Challenge dropdown opens three curated pages that filter the universe down to the most disciplined dividend growers. Each list is updated quarterly so the leaderboard reflects the latest reality:

• 👑 Kings Challenge — companies with 50+ consecutive years of dividend increases. The hardest tier to achieve.
• 🏆 Aristocrats Challenge — S&P 500 members with 25+ consecutive years of dividend increases.
• 🎖️ Achievers Challenge — any US-listed company with 10+ consecutive years of dividend increases.

On the dashboard the dropdown sits at the left edge of the toolbar row (under the search field), next to the Badge Key. Each page is a focused leaderboard you can sort, screen, and click into. Tap below to try the dropdown:

4 · Compare & Pin

4.1Open Compare

There are three places to launch Compare:

• From any Stock Modal — click the ⇄ Compare button. That ticker auto-locks into slot A; pick a slot-B ticker via search.
• From the Portfolio page — the Benchmark Comparison card carries a Compare launcher (both slots open empty for free typing).
• From the Tool Box — the Compare tool on the Portfolio page's Tool Box (see section 6).

4.2Reading the yield chart

• Two colored lines: A in sky-blue, B in violet. Last 36 months of monthly yield.
• ⬥ diamonds mark crossovers — months when one ticker overtook the other.
• Scale legend up top shows the Y-axis range + each ticker's peak yield. If one peak is 3× the other, an amber 9.1× skew warning appears.
• When skewed, click the Log toggle to flip the Y-axis to log10 — both lines regain useful vertical space.

4.3Pinning a face-off

Action buttons under the chart: Export PNG, Share on X (opens Twitter/X with a pre-filled post), Copy (copies the takeaway caption to your clipboard), and 📌 Pin pair. Click Pin pair to save the comparison to your Watchlist tab as a mini-card with live yields. After pinning, a tiny 📝 Add a note… pill appears — click to type a 1-line memo (140 chars). Editing the memo doesn't reorder your pinned cards.

4.4Triangle Compare

The Triangle compares up to four tickers at once on a single radar chart. For each ticker it shows Revenue, EPS, Dividend, an overall Score, and a Flag if one applies — either Trap or Weak. Click Share to open the Triangle Share modal: it renders a branded 540-pixel-wide PNG card you can download or drop into a Twitter / Discord / Reddit post.

5 · Dividend Calendar

The Dividend Calendar is reachable from two places on the Portfolio page — the 12-Month Income Heatmap card carries a Calendar button, and the Tool Box also lists Calendar as one of its tools. (Not in the header.) It shows every ex-div date and pay date for the tickers in your Portfolio and Watchlist, color-coded:

• Gold / yellow / amber dot & pill = Ex-Div date (you must own before this date to catch the dividend).
• Green dot & pill = Pay Date (cash hits your account).
• Weekend exchange rule applied to both ex-div and pay dates: Saturday rolls back to Friday, Sunday rolls forward to Monday.

Click any day cell to open a per-day event modal listing the tickers paying or going ex-div that day. The ticker symbol in the modal (shown in gold/yellow) is clickable — click it to jump straight into that ticker's Stock Modal. The event modal closes automatically when you do.

6 · Tool Box & 13 Portfolio Tools

The Tool Box is a one-click hub for 13 portfolio tools. Look for the toolbox icon labelled “Tool Box”:

• Desktop / large screens — in the Portfolio Summary projection-fidelity row, just under the headline tiles at the top of the My Portfolio card. Sits in the same row as the forward/TTM and projection pills.
• Phone / small screens — just above the search form, alongside the badge-key dropdown.

The 13 tools (alphabetical):

• All Transactions — full ledger of every buy / DRIP / sell / cash move.
• Basic Calculator — quick number-cruncher for ad-hoc math.
• Calendar — opens the Dividend Calendar (see section 5).
• Compare — launches the Compare modal (see section 4).
• DRIP Calculator — portfolio-wide projection at your blended CAGR. Set a Timeline (Years) between 1 and 50 (whole years only — 5, 10, 20, 40 — your call), a monthly contribution (with per-ticker allocation), a global price-growth knob, a global div-growth knob (seeded at your portfolio's 5-year CAGR ÷ 10), and a Tax Rate input (defaults to 15% — qualified-dividend bracket; type any non-negative number for honest after-tax projections).
• Export CSV — full portfolio export as a comma-separated file.
• Google / Excel Sheet — downloads a spreadsheet snapshot of your portfolio (same file as the button at the top of the My Portfolio card).
• Import CSV — bring positions in from a broker export or another tracker.
• My Share Page — generate a shareable public link to your portfolio (you control what's visible).
• Rebalancer — sector / weight rebalancing suggestions.
• Tax Lots — read-only educational view of long-term vs short-term holdings + harvest candidates.
• What If? — portfolio-level simulator. Forward mode lets you add / remove positions, apply Quick Scenarios, dollar-cost average, toggle DRIP on/off, and project the portfolio forward. Reverse Mode flips the button to Run Backtest and replays your current portfolio across a past period to show how it actually would have performed (with or without DRIP) — including benchmark overlays.
• Year-End — year-end summary report for tax season.

7 · Streaks & Journal

7.1Streak tracking

DiviDrip auto-computes every dividend-payer's consecutive-raise streak and assigns a tier based on the curated King/Aristocrat/Achiever lists. The three streak-driven tiers are:

• Dividend King · 50+ years
• Dividend Aristocrat · 25+ years (S&P 500 only)
• Dividend Achiever · 10+ years

Stocks with shorter streaks (under 10 years) simply don't carry a streak-tier badge — the raw streak number is still shown on the Dividend Info tab and contributes to the Quality Score, but there's no Contender / Challenger label below the Achiever line.

7.2Journal

The Journal is for free-form notes and structured entries per ticker. When you create an entry you pick one of six types:

• Thesis on Add — why you bought.
• Thesis on Sell — why you sold.
• Dividend-Cut Note — record of a cut or freeze and your reaction.
• Ex-Div Week — observations during a payout window.
• Free Note — anything else worth remembering.
• Periodic Review — the body of a Weekly or Monthly Review check-in (see below).

A seventh type, JNL Starter, is auto-generated when you import a Robinhood JNL row that lacks context — it lands in your journal as a draft for you to fill in. You can't pick this type yourself in the entry editor.

The Journal page also shows a Weekly Review and Monthly Review check-in button that lights up DUE on cadence. Clicking it opens a guided modal that saves a journal entry tagged weekly-review or monthly-review, with prompts for what happened, what you'd do differently, and your overall feeling — handy for a structured monthly self-review.

7.3Conviction vs Outcome chart

Once you have 20 entries that include both a ticker AND a conviction value, the Journal unlocks the Conviction vs Outcome chart. It plots how your high-conviction trades actually performed. Most investors find their conviction is barely correlated with returns — useful, painful truth.

8 · Site Navigation

8.1Header & navigation buttons

• Header logo & wordmark — the DiviDrip image and the “DiviDrip” text in the top header act as the home button. Click either one from any page to return to the main dashboard.
• Back / Home combo button — every sub-page (Tax Lots, Triangle, Shared Portfolio, Journal, Screener, etc.) carries a single button at the top-left that acts as both Back and Home depending on context. The dashboard itself doesn't show it (you're already home).
• Header action pills — My Portfolio, Watchlist, Journal, theme toggle, and sign-in / sign-out.

8.2Keyboard shortcuts

Keyboard support is intentionally minimal — most interactions are designed for mouse + touch:

• Esc — closes any open modal (Stock Modal, Calendar event modal, Compare, Review, Calculator, Journal entry editor, etc.). On sub-pages with the Back/Home combo button, Esc also triggers Back when no modal is open.

Inside the Stock Modal, switch tabs by tapping the tab strip on desktop or swiping left / right on mobile — see 8.4.

8.3Light / dark mode

The header carries a three-button segmented toggle — ☀ Light · 🖥 Auto · 🌙 Dark. Light and Dark override everything. Auto is market-aware: it shows Light during US stock-market hours (Mon–Fri 9:30 AM – 4:00 PM, local time) and Dark outside those hours — evenings, overnight, and full weekends. The switch happens automatically at the open and close bells. The choice persists per browser. The DiviDrip wordmark gradient adapts for contrast in both modes. (The public landing page /landing/1 is brand-locked dark — the toggle is hidden there by design.)

8.4Mobile gestures

• Swipe left / right inside the Stock Modal to walk through the tabs in order. A one-time chevron hint appears on first touch use, then stays out of your way.

9 · Glossary & Privacy

New to dividend investing? The Glossary defines every term DiviDrip uses (ex-div, DRIP, yield-on-cost, CAGR, payout ratio, qualified vs ordinary, etc.) in plain English, with cross-links so the moment you hit an unfamiliar word you can jump straight to its entry.

Our Privacy Policy spells out exactly what data we store — your email + bcrypt password hash (or Google profile data if you sign in with Google), your portfolio lots and transaction history, your watchlist and pins, your journal entries, your monthly income goal, and any public-share slug you create. DiviDrip never asks for or stores your brokerage login or API credentials; the app is read-only and nothing trades on your behalf. You can hard-delete your account (and everything we have on you) yourself from the Privacy Policy page once signed in, or by email.

[ DIVIDRIP // HOW TO // v2 // 2026.02 ]