Reinvesting dividends in Models

Is there a way to re-invest dividends in the stock when running a simulation or live model? Currently the total return is calculated and the dividends appear in the cash.

I am trying to test the effect of DRIP investing on a dividend strategy.

Jim

Also would like to publish one of my dividend models and include dividend re-investment vs dividend becoming part of cash.

Correcting published models is not permitted although I can implement in my own live models.

is anyone else doing this or interested in this?

Jim

No, I’m afraid that’s not currently possible. The dividends are reinvested, but in the next thing you buy.

Hi Jim,

I’m not sure if that’s true because I have no experience with books and can’t work with them at the moment:

You could try to start as many portfolios as is your maximum position number in your strategy and combine these portfolios in one book. You might want to rebalance these ports / book daily so that the dividends get reinvested right away (if they are big enough and if the asset still fulfills the buy rules). You could try to avoid multiple positions of the same asset in your book. Probably there are instructions somewhere in this forum on how to achieve this.

On the other hand - the difference between immediately reinvesting in the same asset and reinvesting dividends at the next rebalancing is well under 1% on an annual basis - even with only annual rebalancing. Is that worth the higher effort of implementation?

Matthias