Listen to our latest Investing Matters Podcast episode 'Uncovering opportunities with investment trusts' with The AIC's Richard Stone here.
"I have a separate spreadsheet for dividends to log the income coming in each financial year"
I enter my dividends as transactions along with purchases, sells, deposits etc. and then have VBA scripts that format that for daily, weekly and monthly summaries as well as overall totals. Excel 365 provides stock prices as a data source which makes it all nice and straightforward, without having to scrape Yahoo or something.
I find it very useful indeed and it's very simple to just bolt on custom reports/graphs as required or feed that into Power BI for some pretty looking metrics.
Works for me, not for everyone, but I would recommend giving it a go for a true picture of your holdings as well as some good trend insights.
"Income is income. Nothing wrong with others using dividend returns though as a way to reduce their capital cost."
Dividends and capital return are very different. You can think of it that way, if you like, but again this isn't correct. Surely we want to keep realty separate from "motivational tricks to make yourself feel better". Something I find useful, too, by the way.
lti:
Fair enough, if that's your internal system. I use unrealised gain, realised gain and dividend returns individually and combine these to get an overall return. This will give you the same picture but without the need to arbitrarily change your cost basis.
Everyone has their own system, I'm sure, but I am aware there may be people who don't understand cost basis and accounting all that much, and for those people I think it's good we're clear about the actual rules for all of this.
"Well it would as you wouldn't have made as much once tax is paid therefore it would raise your "average""
Sorry? Tax is from your realised gains. It doesn't affect your cost. Maybe I misunderstood your point.
"Any capital gains implications on a partial sale has nothing to do with how an individual logs their cost base on remaining shares."
Ok, keep two sets of records then, or don't - whatever makes you happy. I just wanted to make it clear this is not correct, and don't want others to think you can just fudge your books however you like.
"That is up to you, but I would be saying that I have X amount of shares for free rather than taken 100% profit on half."
And I'd rather say I have 50% full head of hair, rather than a bald spot, but reality intrudes.
" trying to belittle me"
Apologies if it came across that way, I'm just astounded by your logic. It's worth bearing in mind you called me a "wally" twice, while I haven't resorted to name calling as it seems like something a wally would do*.
*Joke
"cas
''the intra-day ten year low for LLOY is 25.43p on 31/07/20 ''
incorrect cas. I bought for under 24p on the 21/9/20"
10 year low is 23.585 on 22/09/2020:
https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/quote/LLOY.L/history?period1=1591056000&period2=1630540800&interval=1d&filter=history&frequency=1d&includeAdjustedClose=true