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Today is Dividend Day.
The series where I teach you 5 things about dividend investing in less than 5 minutes.
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1️⃣ 4 Dates For Dividend Investors
When a company declares a dividend, it doesn’t hit your account instantly.
There is a specific calendar every investor must know.
Declaration Date: The board announces the dividend
Ex-Dividend Date: The most important date. You must own the stock before this day to get the payout
Record Date: When the company builds the list of who gets paid
Payment Date: The day the cash actually lands in your brokerage
The charts below will clarify the above concepts:
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2️⃣ The DRIP Difference
You don’t have to spend your dividends.
A DRIP (Dividend Reinvestment Plan) automatically uses your payout to buy more shares of the company.
This creates a snowball effect:
Your dividends buy more shares
Those shares pay you more dividends
Which buy more shares, that pay you even more dividends…
Over 20 years, reinvested dividends account for nearly 40% of the S&P 500’s total return.
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3️⃣ An Investing Quote
While the world looks for the next moonshot stock, the wealthiest investors focus on what they can keep.
Munger and Buffett famously held Coca-Cola for decades, letting the dividend grow while doing absolutely nothing.
In dividend investing, laziness is often a superpower.
“The big money is not in the buying and the selling, but in the waiting.”
— Charlie Munger
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4️⃣ Consumer Staples is a safe harbor
After the massive tech run-ups of previous years, 2026 has seen a flight to qual