Determining Portfolio Yield

Claire Dearing: So, you can pick up their scent can't you? Track their foot prints?
Owen Grady: I was with the Navy, not the Navajo.
--Jurassic World

Suppose you had a portfolio of four stocks...

Dominion Energy (D) 8 shares
Intel Corp (INTC) 12 shares
Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) 5 shares
Target Corp (TGT) 7 shares

...and you wanted to determine the dividend yield of your stock portfolio. In addition to the number of shares noted above, you'll need two pieces of info for each position: current share price and the quarterly dividend per share. These are readily found on Schwab or on any financial web site (e.g., Yahoo Finance, etc.). Here's the info (price quotes from this morning and current quarterly div/share):

D          $77.75    $0.9175
INTC   $47.28    $0.3150
JNJ     $141.94    $0.95
TGT     $89.24    $0.66

First find the value of each position and the total portfolio value. Using Dominion (D) as an example:

position value = # shares * price/share = 8 * 77.75 = $622.00

Similarly for INTC, JNJ, TGT, we get $567.36, $709.70, $624.68 respectively. We can sum them all to get a total portfolio value of $2,523.74.

Now, find the annual dividend payout for each position and for the entire portfolio. Again, using D to exemplify:

annual dividend payout = # shares * quarterly dividend/share * 4 * = 8 * 0.9175 * 4 = $29.36

For the others, using same order as before, we get $15.12, $19.00, $18.48 respectively. We can sum them all to get a total annual dividend payout of $81.96 for the portfolio.

Now we can calculate the overall portfolio yield:

Portfolio yield = total annual dividend payout / total portfolio value * 100

In our example, this equals $81.96 / $2,523.74 * 100 = 3.25%

This portfolio's yield is well above the current 2% dividend yield for the S&P 500 overall.

Using a spreadsheet, of course, will streamline this task considerably and make updates easy.

position in D, INTC, JNJ, TGT