Brokerage CD interest and preferred stock interest not recorded as profit

Louise- If you are at all familiar with plugging a formula into Excel, I suggest you track your effective annual rate of return on your own, especially when it comes to performing this calculation correctly with preferred stocks.

The tricky part is that most return calculations require/assume periodic dividend payments of an equal amount. While your preferred's quarterly dividends are, in fact, a fixed amount, this is untrue for your first and last quarter of ownership (depending on your buy and sell date and how those dates relate to the IPO date and the Ex-Dividend date, respectively). Sorry to be getting a bit obscure here...

I am an investment researcher and, several years ago, started focusing on preferreds. I wrote a lot of research papers and a book on how to best manage them. One of the papers is titled *Calculating Your Rate Of Return* for preferred stocks and includes the Excel cell formula for making this calculation correctly.

This paper is being given away for free at

Many Happy Returns.

I believe that the securities must have been owned on or before the 1st day of the year for anything to show up in the ROI YTD column. At least that was what I observed playing around in my test data base in Quicken 2004. If I "bought" a security sometime in 2006, then entered some income and then entered some price appreciation (stock price increase) the ROI YTD column came up bubkiss. If I moved the purchase into 2005 suddenly this column came to life. Maybe that's the case here?

Tom Young