Hi,
I saw the posts where dividends were added to the simulation, but is it possible to not count or include income from dividends in the simulation?
Thanks
red,
I am curious as to why you would want to do that?
There is no way to exclude dividends from Sims, but it is easy to remove them after the fact.
You can see the dividends by going to Transactions; All, and they will be listed separately from the buys & sells.
Or you can download the transactions to Excel, sum the dividends, and then subtract them out.
Using Excel you can handle the dividends just about any way you can think of.
Denny 
Denny, let me rephrase my question then (and I’ll explain why the issue):
Is the income generated by the dividend added to the cash so that the portfolio value increases and of course can purchase larger positions? Or is the dividend cash indicated but not accounted for?
The reason I ask is that, in my personal case dividends are taxed straight away at 30% the second do get them which means that I do not have the cash or the growth of portfolio that a simulation would indicate. I suppose you might say that it’s really my issue and that any situation would yield the same problem for me so it sort of a self-effacing issue. But I wonder if in a backtest or system development it won’t be better to let the designer decide what and how to account for dividends?
Thanks for the clarification.
Jeff
Jeff,
open an account in USA (or GB or some other countries) and you have to pay tax on dividends (and realized gains from closed trades) about 1 year later after your tax declaration (?). In Germany it works this way.
P123 is not designed to include taxation rules, and can not do that for every (foreign) investor. Maybe you can do that for you with Excel.
Matthias
Matthias,
As I wrote I was only answering a personal question posed by Denny and as I explained it is an issue pertinent to me and thus not the focus of my ordinal question.
I knew I should not have answer the WHY question because it ends up with comments like these that detract from the fundamental issue.
So, Matthias, et al, forgetting taxes, the question is, for an analyst or system designer, is it not pertinent to be able to choose if dividends are reinvested or not?
Jeff, you have a point, but unfortunately P123 at this stage does not have that option. I think the best thing is to download to excel the list with dividends apply your taxation rate at source and see how significant the impact is, it will not be perfect because of the compounding effect, but it should give you an idea.
I am subject to 15% Witholding tax on US stocks, like any foreigner and have looked at the dividend impact in my simulations, and it is not that material. I am surprised its 30% in your case, I thought internationally it was 15% WH tax and that is it at source at least, is it because its Monaco and there is no W8 form?
Jeff,
sounds as if I had attacked you somohow. I do not see why.
I do not find it pertinent to choose if dividends are reinvested or not:
Aim of a simulation is to reveal, which return a system could produce in a given time. Dividends are just a part of enterprise gains as of the system gain. Excluding any part of the gains from reinvestment reduces future gains and losses, but is not pertinent for the evaluation of the system.
What you do with your real money is indipendent from any simulation.
Matthias
redivy - I believe it is pertinent as some people want to know how feasible it is to live off of dividend income and what the portfolio growth would look like if the dividends were removed from the port. I thought I had raised a feature request for this but I can’t find it now.
Steve