I have recently started investing in a diversified
portfolio of dividend-paying stocks.

I have found that tracking my account value on a day-to-day
basis, which is easy when stocks don´t pay dividends,
is very labor-intensive when you have lots of dividend payers.

The problem is that the day a stock goes Ex-Dividend, a
certain dollar value vanishes from the account, because
it is no longer built-in to the price of the stock, but
the cash will not appear until the Dividend Pay Date.

This issue affects all major brokerage websites, as well
as the monthly account statements online and on paper.

How do people solve this problem? Is there software
or a website that will let me know how much dividend 
cash is "in the mail" at any given day, for a given
portfolio?

Some sort of manual tracking using an Excel spreadsheet
or something similar is not acceptable as an Answer.
I´m looking for an automated solution.

I´m willing to move all my dividend-paying stocks to
another online broker to solve this problem.

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Clarification of Question by atr-ga on 29 Dec 2005 13:12 PST

In response to the comment by siliconsamurai-ga:
The relevant dates for the gap (starting on the ex-div
date and ending on the dividend "pay" date) are actually
widely available in sites such as Yahoo Finance.
And so is the amount (dividend per share).

For example BPT (your example) shows:
Dividend [payment] Date: 19-Oct-05 
Ex-Dividend Date: 12-Oct-05 

So, there is no apparent technical obstacle for such
a site to exist. They could at least mark such holdings
with an asterisk or something to alert the user.

Also, this issue has nothing to do with daytrading.
If you buy and sell a stock in the same day, by definition
you´ll never be holding it at the open when it goes ex-div.

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Clarification of Question by atr-ga on 08 Jan 2006 11:18 PST

I´m going to close this question now. I decided that just using the
Yahoo portfolio features and copy-and-pasting that into Excel is good
enough.

Since there is a gap between when a stock goes ex-div and when you
actually get credited for the amount, I doubt such a site exists. The
stock price would be pricing real time while the dividend credit would
only be a potential payment. The price drops because buyers know they
won't be getting the dividend when it is paid.

Brokerages always have a lag time between when you sell and when you
get the money, it's built into the system - dividend delayss are even
longer.

As for how people solve it, for big dividend trusts such as BPT
(around 11%) and such the people I know just have the ex div dates on
a calendar and know when to expect a sudden drop. This works well
enough since you can't collect or spend the dividend until it is
actually credited to your account.

Do you have a margin account? That would give you some leeway in your
spending and cash-out options even if you don't intend to be a big
margin buyer.

I find Fidelity is one of the least useful for day trading (which is
where such instant updates would be important) and ameritrade is the
best - especially if you do enough trading or have a big enough
account to get their Advanced Analyzer for free.

If this information would constitute an answer I can provide links.

BTW, tracking on a day-to-day basis usually isn't normally a good idea
unless you do at least some day trading and for that you really need
level-2 quotes and something such as ameritrade's quote scope.

(Yes, I have Bloomberg, Fidelity, and Ameritrade screens open right
now - one nice feature of ameritrade is the "portfolio" view (seperate
from the Command Center which doesn't update as often. If you watch
the bottom, your current portfolio value changes real time - although
that doesn't help with the dividends you asked about.
finance.yahoo.com is rather flaky in the way it displays dividends.
The Command Center does let you display actual account balances real
time.)