Titan guide · 6 min read
Dividends in Titan
The Dividends screen tracks the income your companies pay you: what you have collected, what it represents against your portfolio, and when in the year it lands. It is a single view, with no tabs.
In this guide
What a dividend is
A dividend is the share of profit a company distributes among its shareholders, usually a few times a year. Not every company pays one, and a company that pays can change or stop it.
Titan does not tell you what to buy or sell, and it does not promise any return. It processes the information you give it so you can make informed decisions. The decisions are yours.
The four cards
Across the top:
| Card | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Total collected | The total amount of dividends you have been paid |
| Annual target | The dividend target you set in your Profile |
| Contribution to portfolio | Total dividends collected divided by the total value of your portfolio, so you can see how much of what you have came from dividends rather than price appreciation |
| Portfolio yield | What your whole portfolio pays you in a year, relative to what it is worth |
No annual target showing?
Then you have not set one yet. Go to your Profile, say yes to dividends and enter the annual figure you want. It takes a minute, and without it the second card has nothing to measure you against. The whole block is explained further down.
The table, column by column
One row per company, and eight columns that answer different questions. Worth going through them, because two of them are easy to misread.
| Column | What it is |
|---|---|
| Asset | The holding. A company, or any other listed instrument you hold |
| Current position | What you hold of it |
| Dividend per share | What it pays for each share or unit |
| Dividend yield | What it pays in a year relative to today’s share price |
| Yield on cost | The same, but relative to what you paid |
| YTD dividends | What that position has paid you so far this year |
| Total dividends | What that position has paid you in total |
| Total P/L (%) | Price appreciation plus dividends collected, as a percentage |
On mobile the table shows Asset, Dividend per share and Yield on cost. Tap expand, top right, to see the rest of the columns.
That last column is the one to pay attention to. It is not the same P/L you see on the Dashboard, which measures what the price has done. Here the dividends collected are added in, which is the more coherent way to look at a holding that pays you while you own it: a position with a flat price that pays 4% a year has not been flat.
Yield and yield on cost
These two get mixed up constantly, and the difference is the whole point of the table.
Yield, or dividend yield, is what a company pays you in a year relative to what its share costs today. If the share is worth $100 and it pays $4 a year, the yield is 4%.
Yield on cost is the same thing measured against what you paid, not against today’s price. If you bought that share at $50 and it now pays $4, your yield on cost is 8%, even though someone buying today gets 4%.
Both numbers are correct and they answer different questions. Yield tells you what that company offers anyone right now. Yield on cost tells you what your own decision, made at your own price, is paying you today. A position bought years ago at a much lower price can be yielding you far more than its current yield suggests, and only yield on cost shows it.
Pay Day
A heatmap of the days you get paid. At a glance you see whether your income piles up into three months of the year or spreads across all twelve.
It answers a question a table cannot: not how much you receive, but when.
The two charts
They answer different questions:
Collected dividends, month by month. Your whole portfolio’s income, without separating who paid it, with the daily, monthly and yearly averages over one, three and five years. The averages are what make it useful: a single good month tells you little, and five years of monthly bars tell you whether your income is growing, flat, or depends on one holding.
Dividends per asset. One holding at a time, with four bars, one per quarter. It shows how much that holding pays across a year and when it pays it, which is the detail you need to understand your own Pay Day map. It also shows projected amounts alongside collected ones.
The selector for this second chart offers the holdings in your history, so positions you have already sold are still there.
How dividends are configured in your Profile
Almost everything on this screen is built from your Transactions: what you have collected, when, and from what. Only one number comes from somewhere else, and it is the annual target on the second card.
That target lives in the dividends block of your investment plan, and it is worth using the visit to write down the rest of what you expect from a dividend. Five things live in that block.
Whether you want dividends at all. Yes, no, or no preference. It is a bigger decision than it looks: it shapes whether you build for periodic income or for pure compounding, and those lead to different holdings and a different way of managing the portfolio over time.
Your annual target. How much income you want your portfolio to produce in a year. This is the number the second card measures you against.
The average growth window. A dividend that grows is worth more than a dividend that stands still, and how fast it grows depends on how long a period you look at. Here you choose that period, from one to five years.
Maximum payout ratio. The payout ratio is the share of its profit a company hands out as dividends. A high one can mean generosity, and it can also mean a company paying out more than the business comfortably supports. This slider, from 0% to 100%, is where you say how high you are willing to go.
The rules: different yields, different demands
The last one is easier to picture as a ladder, and it is the least obvious of the five.
Each rule pairs a starting yield with the growth you require from it. You might demand 10% annual growth from something yielding 2%, and only 8% from something yielding 3%. The logic is straightforward: a low yield only makes sense if it is going to become a high one, so the less it pays you today, the faster you should demand it grows.
Stacking a few of those rules turns a vague preference for “good dividends” into a criterion with steps, written down so you can measure any candidate against it before you buy. Most people have some version of this in their head, and almost nobody writes it down.
Once a dividend is paid, there is no taking it back. Having them mapped out, company by company and month by month, changes how you think about the portfolio that produces them.
Ran into a problem with this section in the platform? Write to help@titanmanager.io and we will look into it.