Lots of great discussion in here from the past couple days (just caught back up).
Like the discussion on checking returns and what not.
Since I'm a geek, and like to look at numbers, I actually setup a Google Docs Excel sheet. I put it my initial purchase of my stocks, and then continue to update each time i get a dividend (with how much the dividend bought, the current stock price, and the total div amount). It then tracks everything else for me...
- Current price
- The current dividend based off todays price
- My Dividend on Cost
- My current total return based on the current price
- I have it also simulate my 401k returns (since their buried in a fund, all i get is the NAV price, and my total investment amount). So i have it auto-calculate my values based on current NAV, then every few weeks i go and update my total investment amount so its closer to the actual mark (i cant see if/when they pay out anything).
It's quite nice to just open it, let it "load" up all the current values and i can easily see that my Total Return on Altria is 50.8% and its making me a 6.5% dividend on my cost with a current dividend of 5.3%, its up $0.20 today, and it makes up 2.2% of my entire portfolio and is currently worth $X amount.