3 ms·

Dividends reduce SE By what mechanism does this happen? Paying dividends doesn't affect the amount of shares outstanding nor meaningfully impact the market cap

• mrep 6y ago
  It absolutely does, it is just hard to notice because it is small enough and distributed over time thus making it hard to see in a market cap graph especially when most of the value in the market cap is dominated by expected future earnings. If apple were to do a 1 time 150 billion dollar dividend, you would almost certainly see their market cap drop by a similar amount the day after. However apples market cap is 2.39 trillion so that is still only 6.27% of their market cap and could get drowned out by normal daily swings. Highly doubt it though and I would expect to see a corresponding runup to the event to claim the dividend and a corresponding drop after.