The AIC website, user feedback

[SebsCat]

Just a little thing, but in the screener please could you add links to the first & last pages in the list?

Hi There,
Even little things may be hard on that solution as we don't own the development of it. It is a plug in we get from Morningstar and relies upon their development time, lead time, and cost. I think the point of the screener tool is to screen down to a manageable number of investments, rather than to view the whole industry in that view so the 50 companies you can see on page 1 and 100 companies you can actually download data for is designed to be sufficient. You will note we do have this link facility on the "compare companies" tool.

"Little thing" was meant in the context that it's not important! Thanks for the explanation and definitely not worth pursuing if it's not trivial to implement.

[DavidM13]

Hi There,
Even little things may be hard on that solution as we don't own the development of it. It is a plug in we get from Morningstar and relies upon their development time, lead time, and cost. I think the point of the screener tool is to screen down to a manageable number of investments, rather than to view the whole industry in that view so the 50 companies you can see on page 1 and 100 companies you can actually download data for is designed to be sufficient. You will note we do have this link facility on the "compare companies" tool.

"Little thing" was meant in the context that it's not important! Thanks for the explanation and definitely not worth pursuing if it's not trivial to implement.

Aha, understood. Thanks for your understanding then.

[DavidM13]

Thanks for that mc2fool.

1) OK, my first thought was it is probably companies that were previously in there but are now liquidated/merged etc so not in the data feed any more.
But reading how you set it up I am not entirely sure this is accurate. Do you agree that my theory that it is old companies is possible? If so I will have my developer look at that and create a blanket fix for all users. If not it would be helpful to take you up on the offer to PM me your email address so we can look at this in the back end.

A definite maybe on that! As I said, I copied my watchlist and then deleted what I didn't want* and if I use the Income Finder on the watchlist then, lo and behold, there are also some similarly blank lines. So, it looks likely, although as the entries in the Income Finder appear in seemingly random order ** it's difficult to easily tell which may have liquidated/merged/etc. I'll PM you details so you can take a look anyway. (FYI, my watchlist is actually rather historical, from a time when I was trying to decide what to buy, and I haven't used or updated it for yonks, so I'm not surprised if some entries may be past their sell by date!)

* which, for some reason unknown, I thought might be quicker than starting from scratch, but in the end I'm sure it wasn't...
** Suggestion C: Allow the Income Finder table to be sorted by each column!

Suggestion A) I will take it to our internal team for discussion. I think I can see merits in it.

Suggestion B) We purposely made this tool historical to last month end only for a number of reasons so to change that would require quite a lot of reworking on the back end. We were worried about dividends getting cancelled I think which is rare but has been known to happen. Also it only shows a partial picture as some companies declare dividends months in advance and others just a couple of weeks. I am pretty comfortable about not worrying about the first reason, as if it is declared, until such time it is cancelled we are only reporting facts. However, I do worry it will be create a rather distorted/misleading view of the future due to the lags in dividend declarations.

Well, I'm sure I'm not the only one that tries to work out how much in dividends will pile up by when (esp. in an ISA), and I've always done that so far by looking at dividends received in the previous year and assuming they'll be at least as much for the current year (after adjusting for changes in holdings), and I was hoping the Income Finder might help me with that, at least for my IT holdings. So (A) would be really useful and (B) would be nice and, as I say, in one sense you already do it in that the AIC's idea of yield includes both historical and estimates or forecasts. You should, of course, put some wording around it that it is an estimate...

1) Thanks for the PM. We will troubleshoot that bug
2) Allowing the columns in income finder to be sortable has been requested by many people. Very annoyingly the way that is all designed was explained to me as some sort of "virtual table" meaning it isn't really there (even though we can see it!) Which means it cant be done. We know how frustrating this is so thats why we built the "export to excel" function.


Suggestion C. OK I now understand this request fully and it is more complex that I first thought. You are not just wanting to graph the dividends that have been declared but are yet to be paid, you are wanting those that are "likely" to be declared and paid in the future based upon the historic pay outs. You are quite right to say that the yield is based upon this, but that is just a calculation we get from Morningstar. They enter a single pence per share figure into their yearly estimate to power this. Your suggestion would be basically looking at historic ones and tagging them on to the future. But also the system must smart enough to know if a future one has already been declared so the relevant historic one can be ignored. That is not easy as the pay out months may differ from year to year. I would say that using the dividends in last 12 months should provide a really good proxy as its based upon the majority of the most known information. I think the suggestion of pay outs of say current tax year can be added to the queue but suggestion C looks like it could be very messy. I will discuss it properly with the team here and come back with any further thoughts.

[mc2fool]

A definite maybe on that! As I said, I copied my watchlist and then deleted what I didn't want* and if I use the Income Finder on the watchlist then, lo and behold, there are also some similarly blank lines. So, it looks likely, although as the entries in the Income Finder appear in seemingly random order ** it's difficult to easily tell which may have liquidated/merged/etc. I'll PM you details so you can take a look anyway. (FYI, my watchlist is actually rather historical, from a time when I was trying to decide what to buy, and I haven't used or updated it for yonks, so I'm not surprised if some entries may be past their sell by date!)

* which, for some reason unknown, I thought might be quicker than starting from scratch, but in the end I'm sure it wasn't...
** Suggestion C: Allow the Income Finder table to be sorted by each column!


Well, I'm sure I'm not the only one that tries to work out how much in dividends will pile up by when (esp. in an ISA), and I've always done that so far by looking at dividends received in the previous year and assuming they'll be at least as much for the current year (after adjusting for changes in holdings), and I was hoping the Income Finder might help me with that, at least for my IT holdings. So (A) would be really useful and (B) would be nice and, as I say, in one sense you already do it in that the AIC's idea of yield includes both historical and estimates or forecasts. You should, of course, put some wording around it that it is an estimate...

1) Thanks for the PM. We will troubleshoot that bug
2) Allowing the columns in income finder to be sortable has been requested by many people. Very annoyingly the way that is all designed was explained to me as some sort of "virtual table" meaning it isn't really there (even though we can see it!) Which means it cant be done. We know how frustrating this is so thats why we built the "export to excel" function.

Oh it's there alright. I can see it clear as day using Firefox's developer tools. It may be built dynamically but that doesn't mean that, after it's built, it can't be sorted. Just a matter of a little JavaScript....

Suggestion C. OK I now understand this request fully and it is more complex that I first thought. You are not just wanting to graph the dividends that have been declared but are yet to be paid, you are wanting those that are "likely" to be declared and paid in the future based upon the historic pay outs. You are quite right to say that the yield is based upon this, but that is just a calculation we get from Morningstar. They enter a single pence per share figure into their yearly estimate to power this. Your suggestion would be basically looking at historic ones and tagging them on to the future. But also the system must smart enough to know if a future one has already been declared so the relevant historic one can be ignored. That is not easy as the pay out months may differ from year to year. I would say that using the dividends in last 12 months should provide a really good proxy as its based upon the majority of the most known information. I think the suggestion of pay outs of say current tax year can be added to the queue but suggestion C looks like it could be very messy. I will discuss it properly with the team here and come back with any further thoughts.

That's suggestion B. Yes, you can think of it as starting with last year's dividends and modifying those to reflect ones already paid this year and ones that have already been declared but not yet paid, and sticking with the last year figures for the rest.

As you say, using the dividends in the last 12 months/last calendar year/last tax year does provide a fair proxy, I was just hoping you could go a little further.

[DavidM13]

I've just set up some portfolios to try and figure the timing of dividend income into my ISAs (so as to get an idea of when I'll have enough to make it worthwhile investing it) and I've found a couple of bugs and got a couple of suggestions...

Bug #1: one of my portfolios has got 12 companies in it yet the summary line for it (under My portfolios) says it has 15 companies.

Opening up the line shows just the 12 it should, as does Company data and Portfolio analysis, however Income finder shows at the top of the list three blank entries, before going on to list the 12, like so:


My snapshot

Clicking on the pencil or anywhere to the left of it on those lines does nothing. I haven't tried deleting them in case you wanted to have a look at the underlying data, and if you do let me know and I'll PM you my account email address. FYI, I created this portfolio by copying my watchlist and then deleting the entries I didn't want, and then editing it from there. Also FYI, it's nothing to do with any in-browser memory, 'cos I tried logging in with another browser, just to check, and it's the same.

Bug #2: the Dividend dairy says to click on the pencil to see dividends paid on that day, but clicking on the pencil is the one place that doesn't work. You have to click somewhere, anywhere, on the day in the calendar except on the pencil! It's so using both Firefox and Chrome (latest versions of each).

Suggestion A: be nice if the Income finder had a cumulative view, so you could see how much dividends had been paid in total in, say, the tax year up to August. That'd be useful for the (I suspect many) folks that let dividends pile up until they've got a worthwhile amount to invest.

Suggestion B: as the AIC's idea of yield includes estimates or forecasts, and the Dividend dairy shows you up and coming dividends, it'd be nice if the Income finder let you choose to show dividends for the current year/tax year, including future ones.

Bug 1 and bug 2 now fixed entirely.
So no dead funds in your portfolio and also you can click anywhere on the dividend diary box to reveal data for that day.

[mc2fool]

I've just set up some portfolios to try and figure the timing of dividend income into my ISAs (so as to get an idea of when I'll have enough to make it worthwhile investing it) and I've found a couple of bugs and got a couple of suggestions...

Bug #1: one of my portfolios has got 12 companies in it yet the summary line for it (under My portfolios) says it has 15 companies.

Opening up the line shows just the 12 it should, as does Company data and Portfolio analysis, however Income finder shows at the top of the list three blank entries, before going on to list the 12, like so:


My snapshot

Clicking on the pencil or anywhere to the left of it on those lines does nothing. I haven't tried deleting them in case you wanted to have a look at the underlying data, and if you do let me know and I'll PM you my account email address. FYI, I created this portfolio by copying my watchlist and then deleting the entries I didn't want, and then editing it from there. Also FYI, it's nothing to do with any in-browser memory, 'cos I tried logging in with another browser, just to check, and it's the same.

Bug #2: the Dividend dairy says to click on the pencil to see dividends paid on that day, but clicking on the pencil is the one place that doesn't work. You have to click somewhere, anywhere, on the day in the calendar except on the pencil! It's so using both Firefox and Chrome (latest versions of each).

Suggestion A: be nice if the Income finder had a cumulative view, so you could see how much dividends had been paid in total in, say, the tax year up to August. That'd be useful for the (I suspect many) folks that let dividends pile up until they've got a worthwhile amount to invest.

Suggestion B: as the AIC's idea of yield includes estimates or forecasts, and the Dividend dairy shows you up and coming dividends, it'd be nice if the Income finder let you choose to show dividends for the current year/tax year, including future ones.

Bug 1 and bug 2 now fixed entirely.
So no dead funds in your portfolio and also you can click anywhere on the dividend diary box to reveal data for that day.

Almost.

Re bug 1: indeed, there's no longer any blank entries, as above, in the Income finder, but under My portfolios (www.theaic.co.uk/my-portfolios/nnnnn) the summary line for my II ISA portfolio still says "15 Companies" even though there's only 12 in it.

Re bug 2: yes indeed, you can now click anywhere within a date in the Dividend diary to reveal data for that day. However, clicking on the pencil of an already selected date deselects it, whereas clicking anywhere else on a selected date doesn't. Not sure I'd fuss about that as a bug but I wonder if it's what was intended?

[DavidM13]

Just a polite note to say I haven't ignored this and want to acknowledge it. I have boosted it up to the developer, it may not get done before Bank Holiday so thought I should post here to say thanks for the feedback.

[DavidM13]

Both bugs now fixed. The first one is hard for me to test but my colleague assures me it is so. The second one is obviously fixed.

[mc2fool]

Both bugs now fixed. The first one is hard for me to test but my colleague assures me it is so. The second one is obviously fixed.

Confirmed for both. Thanks.