How an ETF reinvests dividends
Let me answer by parts: When a company gives dividends, the share price drops by the dividend amount.  Not always by that exact amount for many different reasons (e.g. there are transaction costs if you reinvest, dividend taxes, etc). I have tested that empirically. Now, if all the shareholders choose to reinvest their dividends, will the share price go back up to what it was prior to the dividend? That is an interesting question. The final theoretical price of the company does not need to be that. When a company distributes dividends its liquidity diminish, there is an impact on the balance sheet of the company. If all investors go to the secondary market and reinvest the dividends in the shares, that does not restore the cash in the balance sheet of the company, hence the theoretical real value of the company is different before the dividends. Of course, in practice there is not such a thing as one theoretical value. In reality, if everybody reinvest the dividend, that will put upward pressure over the price of the company and, depending on the depth of the offers, meaning how many orders will counterbalance the upward pressure at the moment, the final price will be determined, which can be higher or lower than before, not necessarily equal. I ask because some efts like SPY automatically reinvest dividends. So what is the effect of this reinvestment on the stock price? Let us see the mechanics of these purchases. When a non distributing ETF receives cash from the dividends of the companies, it takes that cash and reinvest it in the whole basket of stocks that compose the index, not just in the companies that provided the dividends. The net effect of that is a small leverage effect. Let us say you bought one unit of SPY, and during the whole year the shares pay 2% of dividends that are reinvested. At the end of that year, it will be equivalent to having 1.02 units of SPY. SPY does not reinvest dividends.  From the SPY prospectus: No Dividend Reinvestment Service  No dividend reinvestment service is   provided by the Trust. Broker-dealers, at their own discretion, may   offer a dividend reinvestment service under which additional Units are   purchased in the secondary market at current market prices. SPY pays out quarterly the dividends it receives (after deducting fees and expenses).  This is typical of ETFs. The SPY prospectus goes on to say: Distributions in cash that are reinvested in additional Units through   a dividend reinvestment service, if offered by an investor’s   broker-dealer, will be taxable dividends to the same extent as if such   dividends had been received in cash. The shareholders can't all re-invest their dividends -- it's not possible. Paying a dividend doesn't issue any new shares, so unless some of the existing shareholders sell their shares instead of re-investing, there aren't any shares available for the shareholders to re-invest in.
Many brokers administer their own dividend reinvestment plans.  In this case, on dividend payment date, they automatically buy from the market on behalf of their reinvestment customers, and they administer all fractional shares across all customers.  All of your shares are in the broker's street name anyway, the fractional share is simply in their account system.   The process is well documented for several common online brokers; so any specific questions you may have about differences in policies or implementation should be directed to your broker:  https://us.etrade.com/e/t/estation/help?id=1301060000 https://www.tdameritrade.com/retail-en_us/resources/pdf/TDA208.pdf I just read the article and I'm not sure if the calculation is flawed. When they look at the single stocks. Do they always reinvest the dividends to the same stock? That would be quite unusual behaviour I think.  An investor who uses the buy and hold strategy  might have a bunch of companies which won't exist anymore in 20 or 30 years e.g. coal plants.  While many stocks are a good investment now. Reinvesting all the dividends for decades is obviously a bad decision for a large portion of the stocks.  Maybe I misunderstood the article. But what do you guys think? The answer, for me, has to do with compounding. That drop in price post-ex-div is not compounded. But if you reinvest your dividends back into the stock then you buy on those post-ex-div dips in price and your money is compounded because those shares you just bought will, themselves, yeald dividends next quarter.  Also, with my broker, I reinvest the dividend incurring no commission. My broker has a feature to reinvest dividends automatically and he charges no commission on those buys. Edit:I forgot to mention that you do not incurr the loss from a drop in price until you sell the security. If you do not sell post-ex-div then you have no loss. As long as the dividend remains the same (or increases) then the theoretical ROI on that security goes up. The drop in price is actually to your benefit because you are able to acquire more shares with the money you just received in the dividend  So the price coming down post-ex-div is a good thing (if you buy and hold). You can use a tool like WikiInvest the advantage being it can pull data from most brokerages and you don't have to enter them manually. I do not know how well it handles dividends though. "A dividend is a cash disbursement from the company.  The value of the company goes down the same amount of the dividend, so it is analogous to having money in a savings account and taking a withdrawal every month.  Obviously you are going to have less in the end than if you just kept the money in the account. suppose that I own 10 different stocks, and don't reinvest dividends, but keep them on account, and each month or two, as I add more money to invest, either in one of my existing stocks, or perhaps something new, I add whichever dividend amount is currently available in cash to my new purchase, would this strategy provide the same results? Roughly, yes.  Reinvesting dividends is essentially buying more stock at the lower price, which is a net zero effect in total balance.  So if you invested in the same stocks, yes you'd be in the same place.  If you invested in different stocks, then you would have a performance difference depending on what you invested in. The risk is the temptation to take the cash dividend and not reinvest it, but take it in cash, thereby reducing your earning power. That is, is there some particular reason that the brokers are recommending automatically reinvesting dividends as opposed to reinvesting them manually, perhaps not always in the same item? I'd like to think that they're looking after your best interest (and they might be), but the cynical part of me thinks that they're either trying to keep your business by increasing your returns, or there's some UK regulation I'm not aware of that requires them to disclose the effect of reinvesting dividends.    £100 invested in the UK stock market since 1899 would have grown into just £177 after adjusting for inflation. This figure seems ludicrous to me.  I haven't actually measured what the historical returns on the ""UK market"" are, but that would mean an annualized return (adjusted for inflation) of just 0.5%.  Either UK stocks pay a ridiculous amount of dividends or there's something wrong with the math. EDIT I still have not found a definitive source for the real UK market return, but according to this inflation calculator, £100 in 1899 would equate to almost £12,000 today, for an average inflation rate of 4.14 percent, which would put the CAGR of the UK market at about 4.9%, which seems reasonable.  The CAGR with dividend reinvestment would then be about 9.1%, making dividend reinvestment a no-brainer in the UK market at least." "Generally, ETFs work on the basis that there exists a pair of values that can be taken at any moment in time: A Net Asset Value of each share in the fund and a trading market price of each share in the fund.  It may help to picture these in baskets of about 50,000 shares for the creation/redemption process. If the NAV is greater than the market price, then arbitrageurs will buy up shares at the market price and do an ""in-kind"" transaction that will be worth the NAV value that the arbitrageurs could turn around and sell for an immediate profit. If the market price is greater than the NAV, then the arbitrageurs will buy up the underlying securities that can be exchanged ""in-kind"" for shares in the fund that can then be sold on the market for an immediate profit. What is the ETF Creation/Redemption Mechanism? would be a source on this though I imagine there are others. Now, in the case of VXX, there is something to be said for how much trading is being done and what impact this can have. From a July 8, 2013 Yahoo Finance article: At big option trade in the iPath S&P 500 VIX Short-Term Futures Note   is looking for another jump in volatility.  More than 250,000 VXX options have already traded, twice its daily   average over the last month. optionMONSTER systems show that a trader   bought 13,298 August 26 calls for the ask price of $0.24 in volume   that was 6 times the strike's previous open interest, clearly   indicating new activity. Now the total returns of the ETF are a combination of changes in share price plus what happens with the distributions which could be held as cash or reinvested to purchase more shares." The trend in ETFs is total return: where the ETF automatically reinvests dividends.  This philosophy is undoubtedly influenced by that trend. The rich and retired receive nearly all income from interest, dividends, and capital gains; therefore, one who receives income exclusively from dividends and capital gains must fund by withdrawing dividends and/or liquidating holdings. For a total return ETF, the situation is even more limiting: income can only be funded by liquidation. The expected profit is lost for the dividend as well as liquidating since the dividend can merely be converted back into securities new or pre-existing.  In this regard, dividends and investments are equal. One who withdraws dividends and liquidates holdings should be careful not to liquidate faster than the rate of growth. Most bond ETFs have switched to monthly dividends paid on the first of each month, in an attempt to standardize across the market.  For ETFs (but perhaps not bond mutual funds, as suggested in the above answer) interest does accrue in the NAV, so the price of the fund does drop on ex-date by an amount equal to the dividend paid. A great example of this dynamic can be seen in FLOT, a bond ETF holding floating rate corporate bonds.  As you can see in this screenshot, the NAV has followed a sharp up and down pattern, almost like the teeth of a saw. This is explained by interest accruing in the NAV over the course of each month, until it is paid out in a dividend, dropping the NAV sharply in one day. The effect has been particularly pronounced recently because the floating coupon payments have increased significantly (benchmark interest rates are higher) and mark-to-market changes in credit spreads of the constituent bonds have been very muted. There are ETFs and mutual funds that pay dividends. Mutual funds and ETFs are quite similar. Your advisor is correct regarding future funds you invest. But you already had incurred the risk of buying an individual stock. That is a 'sunk cost'. If you were satisfied with the returns you could have retained the HD stock you already owned and just put future moneys into an ETF or mutual fund.  BTW: does your advisor receive a commission from your purchase of a mutual fund? That may have been his motivation to give you the advice to sell your existing holdings. Your investment is probably in a Collective Investment Trust. These are not mutual funds, and are not publicly traded. I.e. they are private to plan participants in your company. Because of this, they are not required* to distribute dividends like mutual funds. Instead, they will reinvest dividends automatically, increasing the value of the fund, rather than number of shares, as with dividend reinvestment. Sine you mention the S&P 500 fund you have tracks closely to the S&P Index, keep in mind there's two indexes you could be looking at: Without any new contributions, your fund should closely track the Total Return version for periods 3 months or longer, minus the expense ratio. If you are adding contributions to the fund, you can't just look at the start and end balances. The comparison is trickier and you'll need to use the Internal Rate of Return (look into the XIRR function in Excel/Google Sheets). *MFs are not strictly required to pay dividends, but are strongly tax-incentivized to do so, and essentially all do. When you invest in an ETF or mutual fund, you're not investing in stocks or bonds. You're buying shares of a company that invests in stocks or bonds. This level of indirection is what makes it so bond funds do not 'mature.' Bonds inside of ETFs or mutual funds do have a maturity date. When they mature, the fund manager uses the principal value that is returned to purchase another bond that meets the investment objectives of the fund. So the fund never matures, since it is always investing in more bonds when the old ones mature. Unit investment trusts made of bonds do have a maturity date as well, since the portfolio does not change once the UIT is issued. As the individual bonds in the portfolio mature, the principle value is returned to investors. So the overall maturity date is effectively the maturity date of the last bond in the trust. All of the statements quoted above are accurate in explaining why there is no guarantee of a return of principle when investing in bond funds (ETF or open-ended mutual fund). The bonds they hold do mature, but are replaced within the fund as needed. The investor will never see it happen unless they watch the holdings reports filed by the funds.  The only way to have an assurance of the return of principle is to invest in individual bonds, or in unit trusts made up of bonds. "Okay. An ETF is an ""Exchange Traded Fund"". It trades like a stock, on the stock market.  Basically by buying one ETF, you can have ownership in the underlying companies that make up the ETF. So, if you buy QCLN, a green energy ETF, you own Tesla, First Solar Inc, SunPower Corporation, Vivint Solar, Advanced energy industries and a bunch of other companies that are involved in clean energy.   It allows you to gain exposure to a sector without having to buy individual companies.  There are ETFs for lots of different things. Technology ETFs, Healthcare ETFs, Consumer Staples ETFs, Utilities ETFs, etc.  REITS are essentially the same thing, except they own real estate." "Does the bolded sentence apply for ETFs and ETF companies? No, the value of an ETF is determined by an exchange and thus the value of the share is whatever the trading price is. Thus, the price of an ETF may go up or down just like other securities. Money market funds can be a bit different as the mutual fund company will typically step in to avoid ""Breaking the Buck"" that could happen as a failure for that kind of fund. To wit,   must ETF companies invest a dollar in the ETF for every dollar that an   investor deposited in this aforesaid ETF? No, because an ETF is traded as shares on the market, unless you are using the creation/redemption mechanism for the ETF, you are buying and selling shares like most retail investors I'd suspect. If you are using the creation/redemption system then there are baskets of other securities that are being swapped either for shares in the ETF or from shares in the ETF." Wikipedia has a fairly detailed explanation of ETFs.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange-traded_fund "Because I'll be investing time, effort, energy and take some initial risks I would like to receive more shares (more than just purely financial contribution would suggest) I don't see money in that list.  How much money will you be contributing to your own project? Mutual understanding, focusing on big image, rather that covering each and every edge case. These kinds of one page agreements are an excellent ""idea"" and they work just fine when everyone is happy and everything is working well; they are an utter nightmare if anything goes sideways.  Coincidently, the reason you write anything down at all is to have everyone agree on the same big picture at the same time. People's memory of the original big picture gets fuzzy when their money might not come back to them.  You don't need to cover all edge cases, but you need to cover obvious negative outcomes.  What if you can't find a renter?  What if you're late paying someone back?  What if your vendor ""repairs"" something incorrectly?  What if you forget to get a permit and the vendor needs to come back to tear it all apart and redo the work?  What if your project needs more money, who is required to contribute, who has the option to contribute, who gets diluted?  Who is doing the work of managing the project, how much is that person getting paid, how is that person's pay determined, how can it be adjusted?  Is any work expected from any other investor, on what terms, who decides the terms?  What if you get an offer to buy the building, who decides to sell, etc and so forth and on and on and on... You write down an agreement so everyone's understanding of the agreement is recorded.  You write down what will happen in XYZ event so you don't argue about what you all should do when that event does ultimately occur.  You take as much equity as your other investors will allow you to have, and you give them as much as required to get their money.  Understand that the more cooks there are in the kitchen the more difficult it is to act on a problem when one arises; when not if. Your ego-stroking play to ""open source crowd-sourced wisdom"" is nothing more than a silly request for vague advice at no cost.  Starting a project on trust, transparency and integrity is naive.  This is about money.  Why on earth should anyone trust you with their money if you won't do the most basic step of stewardship and spend a couple hundred pounds to talk to a local professional about organizing your first ever project. To answer your question directly, the first precaution you should take is not taking money from any of your friends or family."