Dividends
A dividend is the payment of a portion of a company’s earnings to its shareholders. Payments usually are made in cash, as a fixed amount of money per share, but they may also be distributed in additional shares of stock. Holders of a company’s common stocks may or may not receive dividends, because a corporation is not obligated to issue them. But when it does, dividends are usually paid quarterly.
When a company announces its decision to offer a dividend, it stipulates the date on which the dividend will be paid and the date by which an investor must own the stock to be eligible to receive the dividend. The date of the announcement is called the declaration date. The date of payment is called the payable date, or payment date. The date by which an investor must own the stock to receive the dividend is called the record date. The record date may be set several days or weeks before the payment date, at the company’s sole discretion.
Another critical date, the ex-date, or ex-dividend date, determines which investor—the buyer or the seller—receives the dividend. The ex-date occurs one business day prior to the record date. The seller receives the dividend when the transaction occurs on the ex-date or after. The buyer receives the dividend when the transaction occurs before the ex-date. The reason for this is that a buyer only becomes the owner of the security on the settlement date. Settlement refers to the process whereby a security is paid for and transferred to a new owner. The settlement date for most securities is two business days after the trade date. This is abbreviated by T + 2. In order for the transaction to settle by the record date, the security has to be bought at least two business days before the record date.
The ex-date is one business day prior to the record date and, therefore, the date at which the buyer will not be the owner of record in time to receive the dividend. If th