Can you sell on the settlement date?
Yes, on the settlement the stock is yours to sell with no risk of freeride or day trading applying.
No. You can sell anytime. I am in pedantic mode, sorry, the way the question is worded implies that you can sell only if it rises. You are welcome to sell at a loss, too.  Yes. The fund will not issue a dividend with every dividend it receives. It's more typical that they issue dividends quarterly. So the shares will increase by the amount of the undistributed dividends and on the ex-div date, drop by that amount. The remaining value goes up and down, of course, I am speaking only of the extra value created by the retained dividends. You have to call Interactive Brokers for this. This is what you should do, they might even have a web chat. These are very broker specific idiosyncrasies, because although margin rules are standardized to an extent, when they start charging you for interest and giving you margin until settlement may not be standardized. I mean, I can call them and tell you what they said for the 100 rep. This was the day traders dilemma. You can, on paper, make money doing such trades. But because you do not hold the security for at least a year, the earnings are subject to short term capital gains tax unless these trades are done inside a sheltered account like a traditional IRA.  There are other considerations as well: wash sale rules and number of days to settle.  In short, the glory days of rags to riches by day trading are long gone, if they were ever here in the first place.  Edit: the site will not allow me to add a comment, so I am putting my response here: Possibly, yes. One big 'gotcha' is that your broker reports the proceeds from your sales, but does not report your outflows from your buys. Then there is the risk you take by the broker refusing to sell the security until the transaction settles. Not to mention wash sale rules. You are trying to win at the 'buy low, sell high' game. But you have a 25% chance, at best, of winning at that game. Can you pick the low? Maybe, but you have a 50% chance of being right. Then you have to pick the high. And again you have a 50% chance of doing that. 50% times 50% is 25%. Warren Buffet did not get rich that way. Buffet buys and holds. Don't be a speculator, be a 'buy and hold' investor. Buy securities, inside a sheltered account like a traditional IRA, that pay dividends then reinvest those dividends into the security you bought. Scottrade has a Flexible Reinvestment Program that lets you do this with no commission fees. There are two 'dates' relevant to your question: Ex-Dividend and Record. To find out these dates for a specific security visit Dividend.Com. You have to purchase the security prior to the Ex-Dividend date, hold it at least until the Record Date. After the Record Date you can sell the security and still receive the dividend for that quarter.  ---- edit - - - -  I was wrong. If you sell the security after the Ex-div date but before the date of record you still get the dividend.  http://www.investopedia.com/articles/02/110802.asp I'm a bit out of my element here, but my guess is the right way to think about this is: knowing what you do now about the underlying company (NZT), pretend they  had never offered ADR shares.  Would you buy their foreign listed shares today? Another way of looking at it would be: would you know how to sell the foreign-listed shares today if you had to do so in an emergency?   If not, I'd also push gently in the direction of selling sooner than later. You have to wait for three (business) days. That's the time it takes for the settlement to complete and for the money to get to your account. If you don't wait - brokers will still allow you to buy a new stock, but may limit your ability to sell it until the previous sale is settled. Here's a FAQ from Schwab on the issue. Yes, but it must be remembered that these conditions only last for instants, and that's why only HFTs can take advantage of this. During 2/28/14's selloff from the invasion of Ukraine, many times, there were moments where there was overwhelming liquidity on the bid relative to the ask, but the price continued to drop. quid's answer explains the settlement period well. However, it should be noted that you can avoid the settlement period by opening a margin account. Any specific broker like Schwab may or may not offer margin accounts. Margin accounts allow you to borrow money to avoid the settlement period or to buy more securities than you can actually afford. Note that if you buy more securities than you can afford using margin, you expose yourself to losses potentially larger than your initial investment. If you fund your account with $50,000 and use margin to purchase $80,000 of stock which then drops in value by 80% you will have lost $64,000 and owe the broker $14,000 plus fees. "You answered your own question ""whether someone buys is a different thing"". You can ask any price that you want. (Or given an electronic brokerage, you can enter the highest value that the system was designed to accept.) The market (demand) will determine whether anyone will buy at the price you are asking. A better strategy if you want to make an unreasonable amount of money is to put in a buy order at an unreasonably low price and hope a glitch causes a flash crash and allows you to purchase at that price. There may be rules that unravel your purchase after the fact, but it has a better chance of succeeding than trying to sell at an unreasonably high price." It turns out that in this special case for New York, they have a law that says that if you are changing your filing status from resident to nonresident, you must use the accrual method for calculating capital gains. So in this case, the date on the papers is the important one. "Their is no arbitrage opportunity with ""buying dividends."" You're buying a taxable event. This is a largely misunderstood topic. The stock always drops by the amount if the dividend on the ex date. The stock opens that day trading ""ex"" (excluding) the dividend. It then pays out later based in the shareholders on record.  There is a lot of talk about price movement and value here. That can happen but it's from trading not from the dividend per se. Yes sometimes you do see a stock pop the day prior to ex date because people are buying the stock for the dividend but the trading aspect of a stock is determined by supply and demand from people trading the stock.  The dividends are paid out from the owners equity section of the balance sheet. This is a return of equity to shareholders. The idea is to give owners of the company some of their investment back (from when they bought the stock) without having the owners sell the shares of the company. After all if it's a good company you want to keep holding it so it will appreciate.  Another similar way to think of it is like a bonds interest payment.  People sometimes forget when trading that these are actual companies meant to be invested in. Your buying an ownership in the company with your cash.  It really makes no difference to buy the dividend or not, all other things constant. Though market activity can add or lose value from trading as normal." Note that the rules around wash sales vary depending on where you live. For the U.S., the wash sale rules say that you cannot buy a substantially identical stock or security within 30 days (before or after) your sale. So, you could sell your stock today to lock in the capital losses. However, you would then have to wait at least 30 days before purchasing it back. If you bought it back within 30 days, you would disqualify the capital loss event. The risk, of course, is that the stock's price goes up substantially while you are waiting for the wash sale period. It's up to you to determine if the risk outweighs the benefit of locking in your capital losses. Note that this applies regardless of whether you sell SOME or ALL of the stock. Or indeed, if we are talking about securities other than stocks. No, the dividends can't be exploited like that. Dividends settlement are tied to an ex-dividend date. The ex-dividend, is the day that allows you to get a dividend if you own the stock. Since a buyer of the stock after this date won't get the dividend, the price usually drop by the amount of the dividend. In your case the price of a share would lose $2.65 and you will be credited by $2.65 in cash such that your portfolio won't change in value due to the dividend. Also, you can't exploit the drop in price by short-selling, as you would be owing the dividend to the person lending you the stock for the short sale. Finally, the price of the stock at the ex-dividend will also be affected by the supply and demand, such that you can't be precisely sure of the drop in price of the security. I believe this depends on the broker's policies. For example, here is Vanguard's policy (from https://personal.vanguard.com/us/whatweoffer/stocksbondscds/brokeragedividendprogram): Does selling shares affect a distribution? If you sell the entire position two days or more before the dividend-payable date, your distribution will be paid in cash. If, however, you sell an entire position within the two day time frame of the security's payable date, the dividend will be reinvested, resulting in additional shares. Selling these subsequent shares will require another sell order, which will incur additional commission charges. Dividends which would have been reinvested into less than one whole share will be automatically liquidated into cash. If you want to guarantee you receive no fractional shares, I'd call your broker and ask whether selling stock ABC on a particular date will result in the dividend being paid in shares. The ex-dividend date, prevents this, but people are still able to do this and this is an investment strategy. There are some illiquid and immature markets where prices don't adjust.  In the options market people are able to find mispriced deep in the money calls to take advantage of the ex-dividend date. It is called dividend capture using covered calls.