Gordon Growth Model

Categories: Financial Theory

There are two basic ways to make money in the stock market. The first involves the old "buy low, sell high" plan. That form of money-making is called capital appreciation. You buy the stock, wait until it goes up in value, then sell it to some other sucker when you think it's gotten as valuable as it's going to get.

The second way to make money from stocks comes from dividends. Dividends are cash payments a company makes to its shareholders.

You own 1,000 shares of Pay Me Now Inc., which you purchased at $15. It declares a quarterly dividend of $1 a share. So every three months, it sends you a check for $1,000...one dollar for every share you own.

One theory of stock valuation says that the share price for a company should reflect all future dividends you'll receive from the company. It's a way of computing the appropriate present value of a stock by calculating the present value of its future dividend payments.

That theory is known as the dividend discount theory. Or the Gordon Growth Model.

The "Gordon" part comes from the fact that the math was codified by Myron Gordon in the 1960s. The "growth" part of the name relates to the fact that the equation involves the dividend growth rate over time.

The equation looks like this: P = D1/ (r - g)

P here equals the current stock price. D1 is the value of next year's dividends. "g" measures the constant growth rate projected for the firm's dividends, and "r" gives the company's constant equity capital cost.

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Finance: What is the Math of Dividend Re...1 Views

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and finance Allah shmoop What is the math of dividend

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reinvestment All right people While some stocks pay dividends you

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know a bit of cash and investors get for holding

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the stock It's little incentive Teo you know keep holding

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onto the shares You could take that cash into whatever

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you want with it but you can also reinvest it

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which means buying mawr of the stock you already own

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So the concept may seem boring but it's good way

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to increase your stock holdings And it's like your shares

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or having little baby shares all without you putting MOHR

00:32

of your own money into the process We'LL stock prices

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move around a lot and as such the math behind

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dividend reinvestment can get complex ish or well sometimes just

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plain ugly So let's do a problem here You buy

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thousand shares of Alpaca Corp and Alternative milk provider right

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They provide milk from alpacas of course but also lamas

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goats and yaks Well here's the stock performance over the

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two years or eight quarters that you held the stock

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A quarter is a three month period by the way

01:00

At the end of the first quarter the stock was

01:02

at one o two fifty then at the end of

01:04

Que Tu shares have risen a one o five and

01:06

stock kept going up in Q three reaching one of

01:08

seven five by the end of period Still climbing in

01:10

queue for alpaca reached one ten by the end of

01:13

that year Right next year Same basic story of stock

01:16

reach one twenty share after the end of the second

01:18

year and that's its performance The stock continue to pay

01:20

its fifty cent per share each quarter in Dividend Doe

01:24

It held the dividend steady for the full two years

01:27

so each quarter the company's sends you cash of fifty

01:29

cents per share for each of your thousand shares are

01:32

five hundred bucks each quarter You can choose to reinvest

01:35

that dividend each quarter The amount of stock that those

01:38

dividend repurchase sings by with that five hundred box Well

01:42

it depends on the stock price of time Right when

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you got the first dividend payment while shares were at

01:47

one o two fifty five hundred divided by one or

01:49

two fifty share and that's about four point eight shares

01:52

So after this dividend reinvestment you have one thousand four

01:56

point eight ish shares And yes you can have point

01:58

eight of a share or something That's how the world

02:00

works OK under the second quarter you get another fifty

02:03

cent dividend per share in the stocks out one o

02:05

five Well remember you no longer have a thousand shares

02:08

You have a thousand four point eight shares because of

02:11

that dividend reinvestment thing in the first quarter So this

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time around you get five hundred two dollars forty ish

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sense in dividends Reinvest those dividends and while you get

02:20

another approximately four point eight shares something like that may

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be a little more The process continues As long as

02:25

you keep the dividend reinvestment going you buy shares with

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the dividends giving you Mohr shares which then increases your

02:32

dividend which gives you more money to buy more shares

02:35

Well the main complicating factor in this calculation is that

02:37

the price of the stock keeps moving It makes it

02:40

difficult to have a clear formula for how many shares

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you get for some set amount of dividend payment right

02:45

You have to just do the math a quarter at

02:47

a time So what's the advantage to all this But

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why reinvest instead of just taking cash simplifying our example

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of it You're getting about five shares a quarter for

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eight quarters in reinvesting your dividends So at the end

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of two years you have forty more shares of alpaca

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instead of having kept the cash dividend on your own

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But say you just kept the cash well on a

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thousand shares at fifty cents a share each quarter over

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eight quarters That's four grand Also you still have the

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thousand shares of stock that you owned originally now worth

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one hundred twenty bucks each or one hundred twenty grand

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Add in the four in dividends and you've got one

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hundred twenty four grand See how that works That's the

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map But here with dividend reinvestment and ignoring all kinds

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of taxes and commissions and other you know realistic noise

03:29

well you'd have a thousand forty shares at one hundred

03:32

twenty dollars each for a total value of one hundred

03:34

twenty four thousand eight hundred bucks and change You'd have

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made another eight hundred ish dollars by reinvesting your dividend

03:40

and this presumes that you spent all of the cash

03:42

dividends out to you when you didn't buy back shares

03:45

Ravan reinvesting that cash somewhere you know useful So why

03:48

does all this matter Well the S and P five

03:50

hundred pays about a two percent dividend in the modern

03:52

era Maybe three That is The median company pays about

03:56

that amount The SNP is Justin Index It rolls up

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each of those five hundred companies into a single tracking

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device Some pay a lot Maurin Dividend wanting some pay

04:05

a lot less some pain Nothing Hi Google Hi Amazon

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Hi Facebook We're looking at you non dividend payers anyway

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Since markets go up over time dividend reinvestment has made

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relative returns better for those buying Mohr shares with their

04:19

dividends However it usually takes a long time for those

04:21

differences to really show up in total value or returns

04:25

And all of this is dependent on stock's going up

04:27

which doesn't always happen tends to happen in the long

04:30

run But in short first well who knows also tends

04:32

to work on an average here Yes and P five

04:35

hundred tends to trend upward over the long haul meaning

04:37

that out of five hundred major companies you can expect

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the median one to show stock gains of about eight

04:43

nine ten percent year over time But in that group

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while some stocks go down some go away Well if

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you're a dividend reinvesting in one stock you return then

04:51

depends on what that one stock did Alpaca is going

04:54

up now because fru fru types like to stock their

04:57

fridges with yak milk But what if Yu Lan musk

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develops a cheap lab created chemical alternative Teo yak milk

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You know the bottom line dropout of alpaca dot com

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And then you might wish you'd taken the cash and

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not reinvested dividends Yakety yak as they say or you 00:05:11.895 --> [endTime] know something like that Ah

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