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Forecast Dividends

Hi Vidas, I'm loving the Portfolio Slicer very well done it captures almost everything I need in a portfolio tool. I am primarily an income investor so dividends are an important part of my planning.

It would be brilliant if forecast dividends could be added to a future release of the PortfolioSlicer. I'm thinking somewhere we could manually add in broker forecast dividends and/or declared dividends. It would e great to see future dividend income as well as actual dividend income .

Please let me know what you think

Comments

  • Hi,

    I am also income investor and that is why Portfolio Slicer has the whole page of reports just for dividends.
    So Portfolio Slicer has dates.csv file that is generated by the Power Shell script. This file has all dates up to current date. When Dates.csv is loaded into model, there are additional calculations done - if you will look at the Dates table, you will see fields like Year, Quarter, Month, Last 2 Yrs, etc. Without Dates record Portfolio Slicer would not know what is transaction year, day, month and what transaction dates should be included into selected period. I am explaining this because you suggesting to introduce forecast and that usually means future dates. But I do not have future dates records and I cannot have transactions with dates that are not in dates.csv file. If I'll choose to add future dates, then this adds complexity in figuring out what is the current date. Right now is simple - the current date is the last date in the Dates table. Changing this logic is possible, but not trivial.
    Now where would you want to see future dividend income? What type of report are you looking for? I am assuming you want to be able to differentiate between actual dividends and forecast dividends, right?

    There is a possible solution for you now, but I am not sure it would be good enough for you, as you would not be able to see the difference between actual and future dividends. I am assuming that you are using Generated dividends feature. Workaround:
    1. In Dividends folder create subfolder Manual
    2. In the Manual subfolder create file forecast.txt.
    3. Add forecast dividends transactions, but use existing date, for example for 2016 use date 2016-01-01. This way will work just if you are interested in year level dividend sums.
    4. Run .ps1 scripts, refresh data and now your dividends will include these forecast numbers.
    5. Change forecast.txt to forecast.txt2 and run .ps1 scripts, refresh data and now your forecast file will not be included.



  • Thanks Vidas, you are really very impressive both in terms of Portfolio Slicer product and your very quick and comprehensive responses to questions. At the moment I'm concentrating on back populating the data fits fairly time consuming but I'm sure its well worth it.

    I thought forecast dividends would be a challenge given the date constraints. Previously I've worked with financial forecasting so I realise reporting forecasts are a tricky area. When I've seen it before forecasts and actuals dates use different parameters to keep the actual data and forecast separate. As you quite rightly say there isnt an easy fix

    I'll have a play with the workaround once I'm up and running. The dividend sheet is very useful too

    My ideal report would look at trends of actual dividends by stock against forecast dividends from the brokers,

    Alternatively I might just need a separate file for forecast dvi info.

    Thank you for your very quick and informative reply
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