In periods of uncertainty about economic growth, investors may favor dividend producing assets in their portfolios. Recently we added views to chart the distribution history of individual assets. Today, we show how this extends to the portfolio level with the portfolio yield metric.

The portfolio yield is displayed in the Stats view of the Backtest:

The details of the calculation are accessible by clicking on the icon. The calculation is in three steps:

• The yield is calculated for each asset as the sum of all dividends in the last 12 months, divided by the current price of the asset (e.g. ‘current yield’)
• The asset yield is multiplied by its weight in the portfolio. This represents the contribution of the asset to the portfolio yield. For example, if an asset has a yield of 5% and the asset represents 10% of the portfolio, the contribution of the asset to the portfolio yield is 0.5%.
• The portfolio yield is the sum of the assets yield contributions.

In other words, the portfolio yield is the weighted sum of the assets yields.

The details window contains a pie chart of the asset contributions to the portfolio yield, as well as the option to export the results to Excel:

Note that the yields are based on the distributions of the last 12 months and the current price of the assets. Going forward, the yields may vary based on changes in future distributions and changes in the asset price.

You may inspect an asset’s distributions and historical yield through the Asset Profile view. This view is opened by clicking on the icon at the end of a portfolio position line as shown in the red circle:

The dividend and yield chart is displayed at the bottom of the window (if not, select “Distributions” from the drop-down menu).

The distributions (dividends and capital gains) are shown in green. In this example for Coca Cola Company (KO) the dividends were distributed quarterly with an increase every year. The current yield is shown in orange. It is the sum of the distributions for the last 12 months, divided by the current price of the security.

You may bring up the dividend and yield chart for any stock, mutual fund, ETF in the portfolio. For example, the iShares aggregate bond ETF (AGG):

We can observe the yield changes over the years. The two distribution spikes in december 2011 and december 2012 are due to capital gains distributions.