Stocks & dividends glossary (US)

Short, plain-English definitions for the terms that show up on the US stock pages on this site.

Dividend

A cash payment a company makes to its shareholders, usually out of profit. Not every public company pays one.

Declared dividend

The dividend amount a company's board has formally announced, as reported in its own SEC filing. That's the figure we show on this page - never an estimate.

Ex-dividend date

The first day a stock trades without the value of its next dividend. Buy on or after this date and you won't receive that specific payment. This page doesn't show this date - the SEC's structured XBRL data doesn't include it.

Record date

The date a company checks its shareholder list to decide who gets the upcoming dividend. Usually falls right after the ex-dividend date.

Payment date

The date the dividend cash actually reaches shareholders - typically a few weeks after the record date.

10-K / 10-Q

The two main periodic reports every US public company must file with the SEC: the 10-K once a year, the 10-Q every quarter. Dividend amounts declared during the period often show up in these.

Fonte: SEC EDGAR full-text search — U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

XBRL

A structured, machine-readable format the SEC requires in financial filings. It's what lets us pull an exact dividend-per-share figure programmatically, instead of reading a PDF by hand.

Fonte: SEC XBRL Frames API — U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

CIK

Central Index Key - the unique number the SEC assigns to every company and person that files with it. It's how this page looks up a company's filings on EDGAR.

Dividend yield

A dividend expressed as a percentage of the current share price. We don't calculate this ourselves on this page - it mixes a real declared dividend with a live quote that changes by the minute, so any yield shown would go stale immediately.