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RATIOS & STATISTICS / FINANCIAL STRENGTH
PayRatio(offset,type[,NAHandling])
Full Description

PayRatio, known as the dividend payout ratio, is the amount of dividends paid to stockholders relative to the amount of total net income of a company. The amount that is not paid out in dividends to stockholders is held by the company for growth. The amount that is kept by the company is called retained earnings Typically, PayRatio of 50% or less is regarded as adequate (which would mean that the company is retaining as much cash as it is paying out). At 100% or more, the company is distributing all of its earnings as dividends or even dipping into reserves from previous years.

Formula:

PayRatio = 100 * NetIncBXor / DivPaid

Evauates to NA if NetIncBXor is negative or DivPaid is 0 or negative

It's calculated as Total Dividends divided by Income Before Extraordinary Items for the period, multiplied by 100 to express the number in percentage points. Total dividends, in this case, includes dividends across all share classes and preferred shares. It does not include the value of non-cash dividends like stock dividends that were paid during the period, but it does otherwise include special dividends.

The 5-year average payout ratio is calculated by taking the payout ratios for each of the last five fiscal years, from the annual data feed, and averaging them.


Source and Availability

The data points come from SEC filings or earnings announcements of a company (click here for the line-item reference spreadsheet). Since the data is "standardized" by the data provider the exact number may not exist in the original source. The data is usually a single line-item (see the link at the end for an excel spreadsheet with details). There are two access methods: prebuilt factors and using a function syntax.

When using the function syntax you specify the historical period using parameters in parenthesis as follows:

function(offset,type[,NAHandling])

offset: 0-20 (for interim) 0-10 (for annual)
type: QTR (for interim), ANN (for annual), TTM (for trailing twelve months)
NAHandling: [FALLBACK],KEEPNA,ZERONA

For types QTR & ANN the value is taken straight out of the filing with the corresponding offset, ex: 0 is most recent, 1 is previous, etc. TTM types are computed in two ways: for income and cash flow statement values are calculated by adding four quarterly values. For balance sheet items, TTM is the average of the trailing four quarters.

The NAHandling parameter is optional and is used to control what happens in preliminary reports where many items could be missing. Preliminary reports are press releases by the company and only affect the most recent ("0") offset period. They can last several weeks and can cause false signals due to incomplete data (see "CompleteStmt" for a way to identify companies with preliminary data).

Three options are available when an NA is found in a preliminary report:

 

FALLBACK this is the default. When an NA is encountered the value is pulled from the offset "1" period.
KEEPNA do nothing. NAs will be preserved, which can cause the entire expression to fail.
ZERONA NAs are converted to 0


Pre-built factors are available for convenience and correspond to the following formula syntax:

 

Period Description Corresponding Parameters
Q Recent Quarter (0, QTR)
PQ Prior Quarter (1, QTR)
PYQ Prior Year quarter (4, QTR)
TTM Trailing Twelve Months (0, TTM)
PTM Prior Trailing Twelve Months (4, TTM)
A Recent Annual (0, ANN)
PY Prior Year (1, ANN)
Gr%PQ Growth % PQ (0, QTR) / (1, QTR)
Gr%PYQ Growth % PYQ (0, QTR) / (4, QTR)
Gr%TTM Growth % TTM (0, TTM) / (4, TTM)
Gr%PQTTM Growth % TTM 1Q Ago (0, TTM) / (1, TTM)
Gr%A Growth % Annual (0, ANN) / (1, ANN)
Gr%3Y Growth % 3 year (0, ANN) / (3, ANN) annualized
Gr%5Y Growth % 5 year (0, ANN) / (5, ANN) annualized
Gr%10Y Growth % 10 year (0, ANN) / (10, ANN) annualized
RSD%ANN RSD % 10Y of annuals

LoopRelStdDev
("function(CTR,ANN)",10,0,1,1))

RSD%TTM RSD % 5Y of TTM LoopRelStdDev
("function(CTR*2,TTM)",10,0,1,1))
RegEstTTM Regression Est 5Y Eval(LinReg("function(CTR * 2, TTM)", 10)
, EstimateY(0), NA)
RegGr%TTM Regression Gr% 5Y Eval(LinReg("function(CTR * 2, TTM)", 10)
,RegGr%(2), NA)
RegEstANN Regression Est 10Y Eval(LinReg("function(CTR, ANN)", 10)
, EstimateY(0), NA)
RegGr%ANN Regression Gr% 10Y Eval(LinReg("function(CTR, ANN)", 10)
,RegGr%(1), NA)
%SalesQ % of Q Sales function(0, QTR) / Sales(0, QRT)
%SalesA % of A Sales function(0, ANN) / Sales(0, ANN)
%AssetQ % of Q Assets function(0, QTR) / AstTot(0, QRT)
%AssetA % of A Assets function(0, ANN) / AstTot(0, ANN)
PSQ Per Share Q function(0, QTR) / Shares(0, QRT)
PSA Per Share A function(0, ANN) / Shares(0, ANN)
5YAvg 5 Year Average LoopSum("function(CTR, ANN)", 5) / 5


NOTE: PTM offset is 4 , not 1, since it uses interim periods

Click Here for the Line-Item Reference Spreadsheet.