Charting Dividend Reinvestment

I recently wanted to see a graph of a particular stock assuming dividend reinvestment. This seems like it would be a common thing to do, but neither Google nor Yahoo’s finance sites appear to have the capability. After a bit of searching, I found a way to do it.

aapl-div-2

So here, I’ve plotted $AAPL over the past two years with and without dividend reinvestment. Note that $AAPL first paid a divident in Augustof 2012, so it’s logical that the graph begins to diverge shortly after that. Currently the difference in return is about 4.3% over the two years.1

You can fiddle with this graph yourself. Or, starting from scratch, do the following:

  1. Create a chart for AAPL
  2. Set the range (above I used 2 years)
  3. Set “Type” to Thin Line (optional)
  4. In both the Overlays and Indicators sections, click “Clear All”
  5. Under Indicators, create a Price/Performance indicator with parameter _AAPL and set “Position” to “Behind Price”.
  6. Click “Update”Interestingly, stockcharts.com appears to assume dividend reinvestment by default, while Google Finance and Yahoo Finance do not.