Where can I find the dividend history for a stock?
Google Finance gives you this information. You can go to the required company's website and check out their investor section. Here is an example from GE and Apple. I second @DumbCoder, every company seems to have its own way of displaying the next dividend date and the actual dividend. I keep track of this information and try my best to make it available for free through my little iphone web app here http://divies.nazabe.com
"Shares do not themselves carry any identity. Official shareholders are kept at the registrar.  In the UK, this may be kept up to date and publicly accessible.  In the US, it is not, but this doesn't matter because most shares are held ""in street name"". For a fully detailed history, one would need access to all exchange records, brokerage records, and any trades transacted off exchange. These records are almost totally unavailable." You can use Yahoo! Finance to pull this information in my use. It is listed under Key Statistics -> Dividends & Splits. For example here is Exxon Mobile (XOM): Dividend Payout Information Indices such as SP500 are typically including dividends - the payment of dividends doesn't impact the value of the index. Where can I find data on these dividends?  I found data on dividend yields, but these give me access only to the sum of dividends over the last year. This in turn can change either because there are new dividends being paid, or because you stop counting last year's dividends... This ETFchannel.com page shows which ETFs hold Wells Fargo and you can search other stocks the get the same information on that site. This the same information for Google This even tells you what percentage of an ETF is a particular stock.  Be warned that this site is not entirely free. You will be limited to 6 pages in 6 hours unless you pay for a subscription. Additionally ETFdb.com offers a similar tool. Adjustments can be for splits as well as for dividends.  From Investopedia.com: Historical prices stored on some public websites, such as Yahoo!   Finance, also adjust the past prices of the stock downward by the   dividend amount. Thus, that could also be a possible factor in looking at the old prices. I've never seen a dividend, split or other corporate action during the day, but I have seen trade suspended a few times when something big happened. The market opening price is not in general the same as the close of the previous day. It can gap up or down and does frequently. I don't know of an api to find out if the dividend was cash or stock, but stock dividends are a lot less common. I know that in the case of cash dividends I will get the dividend as long as I bought the stock before the ex-date but what happens in the case of an stock dividend? This is same as cash dividends. You would receive the additional stock. How do you find good quality dividend stocks? That is an easy one. Past performance has always been my key to this answer. also remember why you are investing in the first place. Do you want cash flow, security or capital growth. Also let's not forget... how much time do you want to devote to this venture. There is going to be a balance in your investing and your returns. More time in... the higher returns you get.  As for finding good dividend stocks, look to the Dividend Aristocrats or the Dividend Contenders. These companies have consistently increased their payouts to their investors for years. There is a trading strategy that could escalate your returns. Dividend Capturing, simply put... You buy the stock before the ex-date and sell after date of record. Thus collecting a dividend and moving on to the next one. Warning: though this is a profitable strategy, it only works with certain stocks so do your research or find a good source. Check out the NASDAQ and NYSE websites(the exchange in which the stock is listed) for detailed information. Most of the websites which collate dividend payments generally have cash payments history only e.g. Dividata. And because a company has given stock dividends in the past doesn't guarantee such in the future, I believe you already know that. "As JoeTaxpayer says, there's a lot you can do with just the stock price. Exploring that a bit: Stock prices are a combination of market sentiment and company fundamentals. Options are just a layer on top of that. As such, options are mostly formulaic, which is why you have a hard time finding historical option data -- it's just not that ""interesting"", technically. ""Mostly"" because there are known issues with the assumptions the Black-Scholes formula makes. It's pretty good, and importantly, the market relies on it to determine fair option pricing. Option prices are determined by: Relationship of stock price to strike. Both distance and ""moneyness"". Time to expiration. Dividends. Since dividend payments reduce the intrinsic value of a company, the prospect of dividend payments during the life of a call option depresses the price of the option, as all else equal, without the payments, the stock would be more likely to end up in the money. Reverse the logic for puts. Volatility. Interest rates. But this effect is so tiny, it's safe to ignore. #4, Volatility, is the biggie. Everything else is known. That's why option trading is often considered ""volatility trading"". There are many ways to skin this cat, but the result is that by using quoted historical values for the stock price, and the dividend payments, and if you like, interest rates, you can very closely determine what the price of the option would have been. ""Very closely"" depending on your volatility assumption. You could calculate then-historical volatility for each time period, by figuring the average price swing (in either direction) for say the past year (year before the date in question, so you'd do this each day, walking forward). Read up on it, and try various volatility approaches, and see if your results are within a reasonable range. Re the Black-Scholes formula,  There's a free spreadsheet downloadable from http://optiontradingtips.com. You might find it useful to grab the concept for coding it up yourself. It's VBA, but you can certainly use that info to translate in your language of choice. Or, if you prefer to read Perl, CPAN has a good module, with full source, of course. I find this approach easier than reading a calculus formula, but I'm a better developer than math-geek :)" The current Dow divisor is in Historical Divisor Changes. The OpenOffice GetQuote function offers fields for current dividend either in dollars or yield. I've recently discovered that Morningstar provides 5yr avgs of a few numbers, including dividend yield, for free.  For example, see the right-hand column in the 'Current Valuation' section, 5th row down for the 5yr avg dividend yield for PG: http://financials.morningstar.com/valuation/price-ratio.html?t=PG&region=usa&culture=en-US Another site that probably has this, and alot more, is YCharts.  But that is a membership site so you'll need to join (and pay a membership fee I believe.)   YCharts is supposedly pretty good for long-term statistical information and trend graphs for comparing and tracking stocks. If you want to go far upstream, you can get mutual fund NAV and dividend data from the Nasdaq Mutual Fund Quotation Service (MFQS). This isn't for end-users but rather is offered as a part of the regulatory framework. Not surprisingly, there is a fee for data access. From Nasdaq's MFQS specifications page: To promote market transparency, Nasdaq operates the Mutual Fund Quotation Service (MFQS). MFQS is designed to facilitate the collection and dissemination of daily price, dividends and capital distributions data for mutual funds, money market funds, unit investment trusts (UITs), annuities and structured products. Log in to kotak securities demat account. THere, you can find statement of your sell purchase and dividend received. Immediately move your Roth IRA out of Edward Jones and into a discount broker like Scottrade, Ameritrade, Fidelity, Vanguard, Schwab, or E-Trade.  Edward Jones will be charging you a large fraction of your money (probably at least 1% explicitly and maybe another 1% in hidden-ish fees like the 12b-1).  Don't give away several percent of your savings every year when you can have an account for free.  Places like Edward Jones are appropriate only for people who are unwilling to learn about personal finance and happy to pay dearly as a result.  Move your money by contacting the new broker, then requesting that they get your money out of Edward Jones.  They will be happy to do so the right way.  Don't try and get the money out yourself. Continue to contribute to your Roth as long as your tax bracket is low.  Saving on taxes is a critically important part of being financially wise.  You can spend your contributions (not gains) out of your Roth for any reason without penalty if you want/need to.  When your tax bracket is higher, look at traditional IRA's instead to minimize your current tax burden.  For more accessible ways of saving, open a regular (non-tax-advantaged) brokerage account. Invest in diversified and low-cost funds.  Look at the expense ratios and minimize your portfolio's total expense.  Higher fee funds generally do not earn the money they take from you. Avoid all funds that have a nonzero 12b-1 fee. Generally speaking your best bet is buying index funds from Fidelity, Vanguard, Schwab, or their close competitors.  Or buying cheap ETF's.   Any discount brokerage will allow you to do this in both your Roth and regular accounts.  Remember, the reason you buy funds is to get instant diversification, not because you are willing to gamble that your mutual funds will outperform the market.  Head to the bogleheads forum for more specific advice about 3 fund portfolios and similar suggested investment strategies like the lazy portfolios.  The folks in the forums there like to give specific advice that's not appropriate here. If you use a non-tax-advantaged account for investing, buy and sell in a tax-smart way.  At the end of the year, sell your poor performing stocks or funds and use the loss as a tax write-off.  Then rebalance back to a good portfolio.  Or if your tax bracket is very low, sell the winners and lock in the gains at low tax rates.  Try to hold things more than a year so you are taxed at the long-term capital gains rate, rather than the short-term. Only when you have several million dollars, then look at making individual investments, rather than funds.  In a non-tax-advantaged account owning the assets directly will help you write off losses against your taxes.  But either way, it takes several million dollars to make the transactions costs of maintaining a portfolio lower than the fees a cheap mutual/index fund will charge.