Personal Finance

Dividend Paying Stocks and Survivorship Bias

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Survivorship Bias

One of the most important concepts in all of investing is “survivorship bias”.  Per wikipedia:

In finance, survivorship bias is the tendency for failed companies to be excluded from performance studies because they no longer exist. It often causes the results of studies to skew higher because only companies which were successful enough to survive until the end of the period are included.

You should view any sort of “theory” on stock selection such as value, small-cap, growth, or dividend payers (generally part of the “value” spectrum) as a “sales pitch”.  When someone tries to sell you on something, they will use whatever data that is available to support their pitch.

The data that is generally available is in the stock market “raw” data.  You can see the price changes, the dividends, and compare these against your selected group or theory in a variety of ways.

Valuing Dividends

In general, it is more difficult to determine total stock returns (i.e. how successful your proposed theory is) when you include dividends.  It is easy to look at the “price” of a stock from 10 years ago and the price of that same stock today and said it “went up 25%” or “went down 25%”.  Or, if you owned that stock and are looking for it, that the stock doesn’t exist in the index any more (it went bankrupt, merged with someone else, or went private).  Even large and sophisticated investors sometimes forget to include dividends in their calculations.

Dividends are harder because they are payouts to shareholders and then you need to determine what happened with those dividends.  For my trust funds, for example, the dividends are received in cash.  Then we take the cash and re-invest it periodically, in our case annually.  Thus you don’t earn a “return” on that money, other than interest (which used to be significant, but now can essentially be modeled at zero since interest rates are so low) during that time.

For most models used by analysts, dividends paid are assumed to be re-invested in shares.  Thus if you receive a dividend of 2%, you essentially now own 2% more in shares, and you also earn dividends on those shares going forward, as well.  To make it a bit more complicated, there are taxes that you have to pay when you receive those dividends, so you may want to reduce the effective value of those dividends by 15% (the current taxable rate) or closer to 30% if that exclusion is taken away when the tax laws are changed in 2013.  Here is a wikipedia article that reviews the taxation of dividends for individuals.

Dividends are important.  Per the “dividends aristocrats” methodology used by the S&P 500 and found  here,

Since 1926, dividends have contributed nearly a third of total equity return while capital gains have contributed two-thirds. Sustainable dividend income and capital appreciation potential are both important in determining total return expectations.

For our own portfolios, dividends have brought in a substantial portion of total return.  The impact is largest on our biggest funds, portfolio 1 and 2, since they have more stocks and a longer time frame to accumulate dividends.

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Generation X To The Rescue?

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I like writing about things I know little about, because typically I learn a lot from the commenters, and get humbled at times. I am sure that the following will be one of those types of posts.

I have had this thought rolling around in my head for quite some time, and wanted to air it out to see what type of play it will get.

Our entitlement programs steam ahead into oblivion here in the US. In particular Social Security, while not exactly a Ponzi Scheme (but close enough), is on the Highway to Hell, if something isn’t done to fix it.

The only time I remember that something was honestly tried to fix SS was when GW Bush attempted to let a tiny portion (was it 4%?) of new inputs be allowed to be managed in a private account. Not many will remember that debate, but it was ridiculous. Literally, I heard over and over that the OLD PEOPLE WERE GOING TO BE THROWN OUT INTO THE STREETS AND FREEZING COLD. The noise was incredible, and very little logical, well thought out debate was presented. I am still disgusted when I think of how that debate was framed.

Every time that I get my pay stub I look at those numbers leaving my net pay and cringe knowing that MY PROMISE will be broken. This is a system that will most likely be insolvent by the time I get to the age of collecting. I have taken it for granted, and so have many of the folks I have talked to that are my age. My age – Generation X.

Loosely, Gen X is described as the post Boomer generation, the 13th to be raised under the flag of the good ‘ol USA. The birth years (again, loosely) are said to vary from definition to definition, but center between 1961 and 1981. I fall almost smack dab in the middle of it. So does my wife. And most of my friends. We talk about things like this.

This time period saw some of the lowest birth rates in the US. We don’t have enough of us to support all of you (I’m talkin’ to you, Boomers!). We are paying into a system (Social Security) that is designed, mathematically, to fail. Of course SS is just one of our many entitlement programs that are going to be under intense pressure in the future – if nothing changes. That is a big if.

The thrust of my thinking here is that it will be up to my g-g-g-Generation to fix this mess. As I look at all the grey hairs in the Senate and House (there are exceptions, of course) my thinking is that these things aren’t about political parties, they are age and culture differences. The folks I hang around with – Democrat, Republican, Tea, whataver, want things fixed, and done right. This isn’t universal, of course, but I hear a lot more common sense out of younger people and younger CongressCritters than the Old Guard.

Paul Ryan is a Gen X’er. I think the guy is fantastic and a breath of fresh air, and I firmly believe that his message and belief system is held in check a LOT by the Old Guard (I am pointing that finger at you again, Boomers). Sarah Palin is also a Gen X’er. Have you heard anyone else in politics say things like this? Again, this isn’t a party thing, it is a generational thing. I sort of feel like in a lot of respects, we have our own old person combine in Washington DC.

If we stay on the current course there will be hell to pay for anyone who hasn’t saved their dough, as far as retirement goes. But most of us (at least the people my age that I talk to) aren’t that stupid. Some of us are.

I guess I am tired of the Old Guard who screwed up the system telling me and others like Ryan how bad it could get screwed up if attempts are made to fix it. To me, it isn’t about parties, it is about generations. Generation X might end up being the folks that have to fix…everything.

Quote of the Day: John Robb

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Global transition points like this are so rare, it’s a great time to be alive.

John Robb

Right on. Yes. Yes.

More of this type of thinking, please.

If I could live at any time in history it would be now.

(If you are not a regular reader of Mr. Robb’s Global Guerrillas, get that way.)

(Also check out Mr. Robb’s way cool new Wiki MiiU, which is all about resilience. I eagerly await his book on resilient communities.)

(Here is an xcellent John Robb talk about open source ventures, but full disclosure, a lot of it sailed over my head.)

(And if you have not read his book, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization, go get it.)

Friends, please let me know in the comments, on a scale of 1 to 5, strongly disagree to strongly agree, how you respond to this quote. Put me down as a 5, obviously enough.

Poverty and Statistics

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I am repairing a gap in my education by reading Thomas Sowell’s classic, Vision of the Anointed, which was written in 1992 but is still, unfortunately, as valid a critique of leftist thought as it was then. As an example of his methods, he constructs an experiment in statistics. This concerns poverty and inequality and, in particular, the poverty of leftist thinking.

He imagines an artificial population that has absolute equality in income. Each individual begins his (or her) working career at age 20 with an income of $10,000 per year. For simplicity’s sake, we must imagine that each of these workers remains equal in income and at age 30, receives a $10,000 raise. They remain exactly equal through the subsequent decades until age 70 with each receiving a $10,000 raise each decade. He (or she) then retires at age 70 with income returning to zero.

All these individuals have identical savings patterns. They each spend $5,000 per year on subsistence needs and save 10% of earnings above subsistence. The rest they use to improve their current standard of living. What statistical measures of income and wealth would emerge from such a perfectly equal pattern of income, savings and wealth?
 

Age

Annual Income

Subsistence

Annual Savings

Lifetime Savings
 
20

$10,000

$5,000

$500

$0
30

$20,000

$5,000

$1,500

$5,000
40

$30,000

$5,000

$2,500

$20,000
50

$40,000

$5,000

$3,500

$45,000
60

$50,000

$5,000

$4,500

$80,000
70

$0

$5,000

$0

$125,000

 

Unfortunately, even with an Excel spreadsheet, I cannot get these numbers to line up properly.

[Jonathan adds: Many thanks to Andrew Garland for providing html code to display these numbers clearly.]

Now, let us look at the inequities created by this perfectly equal income distribution. The top 17% of income earners has five times the income of the bottom 17% and the top 17% of savers has 25 times the savings of the bottom 17%. That is ignoring those with zero in each category. If the data were aggregated and considered in “class” terms, we find that 17% of the people have 45% of the all the accumulated savings for the whole society. Taxes are, of course, ignored.

What about a real world example ? Stanford California, in the 1990 census, had one of the highest poverty rates in the Bay Area, the largely wealthy region surrounding San Francisco Bay. Stanford, as a community, has a higher poverty rate than East Palo Alto, a low income minority community nearby. Why ? While undergraduate students living in dormitories are not counted as residents in census data, graduate students living in campus housing are counted. During the time I was a medical student, and even during part of my internship and residency training, my family was eligible for food stamps. The census data describing the Stanford area does not include all the amenities provided for students and their families, making the comparison even less accurate. This quintile of low income students will move to a high quintile, if not the highest within a few years of completion of graduate school, A few, like the Google founders, will acquire great wealth rather quickly. None of this is evident in the statistics.

Statistics on poverty and income equality are fraught with anomalies like those described by Professor Sowell. That does not prevent their use in furthering the ambitions of the “anointed.”

16 Years

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Lex’s post about the couple who played the Damned at their wedding was pretty timely for me. You see, today is my 16th anniversary.

I started to talk about weddings in general in that comment thread, and as I typically do, I began to think about my wedding. There were a total of four people in attendance. Myself, my wife, a photographer, and a Lutheran pastor. What follows is how we got there and is a personal love story so click below the fold if that is what you want.

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