ie: if the benchmark is set to SPY, do those dividends get reinvested in SPY on the payment date to produce a compounded benchmark index?
Thanks,
Simon.
ie: if the benchmark is set to SPY, do those dividends get reinvested in SPY on the payment date to produce a compounded benchmark index?
Thanks,
Simon.
Short answer - yes.
I knew we re-invested dividends in the default benchmark. But your question made me wonder if did so for custom benchmarks. A quick test shows that we do. In the attached backtest you can can see the benchmark beating the algorithm because the algo doesn't re-invest the dividends. But if you comment out the "if" statement and rebalance daily, the algo and benchmark end up with the same returns.
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Hi Dan,
Does the benchmark computation suffer from the reported dividend computation bug (https://www.quantopian.com/posts/the-dividend-calculation-looks-very-wrong) or not? If the benchmark splits over the backtest period and pays regular dividends, will it be correct?
Grant
The computation of the benchmark hypothetically would be affected by the computation bug. But I believe SPY has no splits since 2002, so I think the point is moot for any backtest using the default benchmark. If you benchmarked against something like AAPL, the benchmark would be affected.
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SPY's recent dividend yield has been ~2%. Dan kindly posted a backtest just above which you can use to investigate how this difference compounds.