A little thank you to Warren Buffet

[Rain Man]

Originally Posted by Amnorix

Do you track the dividends you receive at all? In theory, if I had limitless time, what I'd like to do is track the dividends I get per stock and that way I'd be able to precisely calculate the "real" return on my investment. That isn't a tool that my brokerage firm seems to have, unless I'm missing something.

But it seems like a heckuva lot of work too.

I've been going back and forth on dividends. My account is with e-trade, and with a bit of work you can tell it to reinvest dividends, which seems like it would make total return tracking easier. Apparently you can get partial shares of stock by doing so.

I've held off because I'm not sure how rounding works when you only have $1,000 worth of a particular stock, but I'm tempted to do it. Right now I'm not tracking dividends at all other than just saying, "Hmm, 3 percent per year means I should add..."

It's a bit of a gap, because I have one stock that nominally has just been break even for the past five years or so. It's up perhaps one percent. But it's an REIT and it pays some ungodly dividend, around 8 or 9 percent. So it's actually been a good stock for me. If I reinvested, I'd eventually sell it even if it didn't appreciate, and I can't figure out if that's a success or not. I think it is, but I'm not sure.