Where can I find accurate historical distribution data for mutual funds?
"In the case of a specific fund, I'd be tempted to get get an annual report that would disclose distribution data going back up to 5 years.  The ""View prospectus and reports"" would be the link on the site to note and use that to get to the PDF of the report to get the data that was filed with the SEC as that is likely what matters more here.  Don't forget that mutual fund distributions can be a mix of dividends, bond interest, short-term and long-term capital gains and thus aren't quite as simple as stock dividends to consider here." "I keep spreadsheets that verify each $ distribution versus the rate times number of shares owned. For mutual funds, I would use Yahoo's historical data, but sometimes shows up late (a few days, a week?) and it isn't always quite accurate enough. A while back I discovered that MSN had excellent data when using their market price chart with dividends ""turned on,"" HOWEVER very recently they have revamped their site and the trusty URLs I have previously used no longer work AND after considerable browsing, I can no longer find this level of detail anywhere on their site !=( Happily, the note above led me to the Google business site, and it looks like I am ""back in business""... THANKS!" 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.
Hey Sheehan, I believe Schwab provides this info.  None of the online free portfolio managers I know of gives you this info.  The now defunct MS Money used to have this. The best thing to do is to use a spreadsheet.  Or you could use the one I use.  http://www.moneycone.com/did-you-beat-the-market-mr-investor/ . (disclaimer: that's my blog) On Monday, the 27th of June 2011, the XIV ETF underwent a 10:1 share split. The Yahoo Finance data correctly shows the historic price data adjusted for this split.  The Google Finance data does not make the adjustment to the historical data, so it looks like the prices on Google Finance prior to 27 June 2011 are being quoted at 10 times what they should be.   Coincidentally, the underlying VIX index saw a sudden surge on the Friday (24 June) and continued on the Monday (27 June), the date that the split took effect.  This would have magnified the bearish moves seen in the historic price data on the XIV ETF. Here is a link to an article detailing the confusion this particular share split caused amongst investors.  It appears that Google Finance was not the only one to bugger it up.  Some brokers failed to adjust their data causing a lots of confusion amongst clients with XIV holdings at the time. This is a recurring problem on Google Finance, where the historic price data often (though not always) fails to account for share splits. "If you're looking to generate your own charts, you can get up-to-date TSP fund share prices in a Google Docs spreadsheet by ""scraping"" the data from the HTML of certain TSP webpages. You'll need to do this because the GoogleFinance function does not recognize ""private"" funds or collective trusts like those of the TSP. See this thread for tips: Bogleheads • View topic - GoogleFinance price quotes for TSP Funds" The biggest issue with Yahoo Finance is the recent change to the API in May. The data is good quality, includes both dividend/split adjusted and raw prices, but it's much more difficult to pull the data with packages like R quantmod than before.  Google is fine as well, but there are some missing data points and you can't unadjust the prices (or is it that they're all unadjusted and you can't get adjusted? I can't recall). I use Google at home, when I can't pull from Bloomberg directly and when I'm not too concerned with accuracy.  Quandl seems quite good but I haven't tried them. There's also a newer website called www.alphavantage.co, I haven't tried them yet either but their data seems to be pretty good quality from what I've heard. The Telegraph had an interesting article recently going back 30 years for Mutual's in the UK that had beaten the market and trackers for both IT and UT  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/investing/11489789/The-funds-that-have-returned-more-than-12pc-per-year-for-THIRTY-years.html "The full holdings will be listed in the annual report of the fund, obviously the holdings would only be completely accurate as of the date of the reporting. This is the most recent annual report for FMAGX.  I got it from my Schwab research section under ""All Fund Documents"" but I'm sure you can find it other ways.  When I use google to search for ""fmagx annual report"" this link was the first result." Here is one the links for Goldmansachs. Not to state the obvious, but most of their research is only available to their clients. http://www.goldmansachs.com/research/equity_ratings.html What you want is the distribution yield, which is 2.65. You can see the yield on FT as well, which is listed as 2.64. The difference between the 2 values is likely to be due to different dates of updates. http://funds.ft.com/uk/Tearsheet/Summary?s=CORP:LSE:USD Yahoo provides dividend data from their Historical Prices section, and selecting Dividends Only, along with the dates you wish to return data for. Here is an example of BHP's dividends dating back to 1998. Further, you can download directly to *.csv format if you wish: http://real-chart.finance.yahoo.com/table.csv?s=BHP.AX&a=00&b=29&c=1988&d=06&e=6&f=2015&g=v&ignore=.csv "Yahoo Finance is definitely a good one, and its ultimately the source of the data that a lot of other places use (like the iOS Stocks app), because of their famous API. Another good dividend website is Dividata.com.  It's a fairly simple website, free to use, which provides tons of dividend-specific info, including the highest-yield stocks, the upcoming ex-div dates, and the highest-rated stocks based on their 3-metric rating system.  It's a great place to find new stocks to investigate, although you obviously don't want to stop there.  It also shows dividend payment histories and ""years paying,"" so you can quickly get an idea of which stocks are long-established and which may just be flashes in the pan. For example:  Lastly, I've got a couple of iOS apps that really help me with dividend investing: Compounder is a single-stock compound interest calculator, which automatically looks up a stock's info and calculates a simulated return for a given number of years, and Dividender allows you to input your entire portfolio and then calculates its growth over time as a whole.     The former is great for researching potential stocks, running scenarios, and deciding how much to invest, while the latter is great for tracking your portfolio and making plans regarding your investments overall." "It's easy for me to look at an IRA, no deposits or withdrawal in a year, and compare the return to some index. Once you start adding transactions, not so easy. Here's a method that answers your goal as closely as I can offer: SPY goes back to 1993. It's the most quoted EFT that replicates the S&P 500, and you specifically asked to compare how the investment would have gone if you were in such a fund. This is an important distinction, as I don't have to adjust for its .09% expense, as you would have been subject to it in this fund. Simply go to Yahoo, and start with the historical prices. Easy to do this on a spreadsheet. I'll assume you can find all your purchases inc dates & dollars invested. Look these up and treat those dollars as purchases of SPY. Once the list is done, go back and look up the dividends, issues quarterly, and on the dividend date, add the shares it would purchase based on that day's price. Of course, any withdrawals get accounted for the same way, take out the number of SPY shares it would have bought. Remember to include the commission on SPY, whatever your broker charges.  If I've missed something, I'm sure we'll see someone point that out, I'd be happy to edit that in, to make this wiki-worthy.  Edit - due to the nature of comments and the inability to edit, I'm adding this here. Perhaps I'm reading the question too pedantically, perhaps not. I'm reading it as ""if instead of doing whatever I did, I invested in an S&P index fund, how would I have performed?"" To measure one's return against a benchmark, the mechanics of the benchmarks calculation are not needed. In a comment I offer an example - if there were an ETF based on some type of black-box investing for which the investments were not disclosed at all, only day's end pricing, my answer above still applies exactly. The validity of such comparisons is a different question, but the fact that the formulation of the EFT doesn't come into play remains. In my comment below which I removed I hypothesized an ETF name, not intending it to come off as sarcastic. For the record, if one wishes to start JoesETF, I'm ok with it." James Roth provides a partial solution good for stock picking but let's speed up process a bit, already calculated historical standard deviations: Ibbotson, very good collection of research papers here, examples below Books "I've just started using Personal Capital (www.personalcapital.com) after seeing the recommendation at several places.  I believe it gives you what you want to see, but I don't think you can back populate it with old information.   So if you log in and link accounts today, you'll have it going forward. I only put in my investment accounts as I use another tool to track my day-to-day spending.   I use Personal Capital to track my investment returns over time.  How did my portfolio compare to S&P 500, etc.   And here is a shot of the ""You Index"" which I think is close to what you are looking for:" For safety. If something catastrophic happens to your bank and your money is in there you will lose any not covered by FDIC. So if you have a very large amount of money you will store it in bonds as its much less likely that the US treasury will go bankrupt than your bank. I also literally just posted this in another thread: Certain rules and regulations penalize companies or institutions for holding cash, so they are shifting to bonds and bills. Fidelity, for example, is completely converting its $100 billion dollar cash fund to short term bills. Its estimated that over $2 trillion that is now in cash may be converted to bills, and that will obviously put upward preasure on the price of them. The treasury is trying to issue more short term debt to balance out the demand. read more here: http://www.wsj.com/articles/money-funds-clamor-for-short-term-treasurys-1445300813 I received an allowance growing up.  There were stipulations on what I had to do with it that helped instill the values my parents wanted - in their case they were hoping to teach me to give money to my church, so I had a mandatory amount that I had to give when I received the allowance.  To this day I still give money to the church, so I guess it stuck. The allowance was tied to my doing some basic chores around the house - but loosely.  It wasn't a reward for doing those chores, but it would be taken away if I didn't do them.  Before I was of a legal working age I could do larger unusual tasks around the house for more money.   The relationship between chores and some form of allowance is, I think, tricky.  I don't think kids should be taught that the only reason to work is to earn money.  They won't earn money for keeping their future homes clean or by volunteering at the local food bank, but these are both good things to do.  At the same time it is good to teach that work has a reward and that lack of work means lack of a reward. My parents set up a savings account for me quite early.  Largely what went in there was birthday cash from relatives (a great thing to talk to any family members who might give your kids gifts about) and the income from my once-yearly sale of baked goods at a craft fair.  These were bigger amounts of money that I could take pride in depositing, and keeping them in a bank helped prevent me from spending them willy-nilly. I also got a credit card at the age of 16 (only allowed in some states in the US, not sure about internationally).  My parents oversaw my spending habits with it and made sure I always paid in full and on time.  The money I spent was tied to my summer work in high school and college.  I thought it was extremely valuable to learn how to manage a credit card before college when the card companies often seem to prey on young customers.