Dividend Capture Scanner v8

The scanner starts with the S&P 500, the 500 largest US companies (think Apple, Coca-Cola, Johnson and Johnson). On its own, the S&P 500 rarely has stocks paying 8% or more, so the scanner also adds high-yield income names: REITs, BDCs, closed-end funds, and preferreds. This is where the highest yields usually live. The list stays current automatically.

For every stock, the tool checks Yahoo Finance for the upcoming ex-dividend date, the dividend amount, the current price, how many shares trade daily, and how volatile the stock is.

Each stock must pass four checks. If it fails any one of them, it is skipped.

When a stock pays a dividend, its price usually drops by about that amount the same day. The real question is: how long does it take to climb back to the price you paid? The scanner looks at the last two years of history and, for each past ex-dividend date, measures how many trading days the stock took to recover. It reports both the average and the worst case. If a past dividend never recovered within 60 trading days, the worst case shows ">60" so that risk is never hidden. A faster rebound means your money is freed up sooner. The same history is also used to find each stock's best entry point: the scanner tests buying 1 to 20 trading days before the ex-date and reports the number of days that has worked best. And it measures the drop ratio, which is how much of the dividend the price actually gives up on the ex-date. Below 1.0 means it drops less than the dividend, which is where the capture profit comes from.

Each stock gets a score that rewards the best use of your money over time. The idea is continuous rotation: hold a stock through the dividend, sell once it is back to even or better, then move the same money straight into the next upcoming dividend. So a high yield that also rebounds quickly scores best, because that capital can be put to work again sooner. Past dividends that never recovered are charged at the full 60-day wait, so unreliable stocks honestly score lower. The trend check uses total-return prices, so big payers are not unfairly marked as falling, and a downward trend or thin trading lowers the score.

The top candidates are displayed in a ranked table and saved to a file so you can review and compare them each day. Each row shows the yield, the average and worst-case rebound, the best entry timing, the real ex-date drop, the trend, the after-tax dividend per 100-share lot (shown at two tax rates, 35% and 25%), and the overall score. The scanner also builds a Rotation Plan: a trade calendar that rolls one pot of capital (default $50,000, adjustable) from one dividend into the next. It buys on each stock's best entry day, sells at its average rebound, and shows the estimated net dollars per trade after tax (at both rates) and any financing fee, with running totals. The plan prints below the shortlist, is saved as a second sheet in the Excel file, and is also saved as a dated rotation_calendar_YYYYMMDD.html, a colour-coded month-grid calendar that opens in any browser.

Once account access is set up, the scanner will connect directly to Interactive Brokers to check live prices and place trades without leaving the tool. The first step is paper trading: the whole strategy runs on simulated money until the real results match the predictions. The full plan is on the Paper Trading page.