Dividends

Forward Contracts mimic the cash-flow of the underlying instruments. Therefore KODIAK Derivatives needs to generate the correct cash-flows for all forward contracts.  For contracts with underlying shares, the system needs to generate and attach all dividend payments to the correct forward contracts.

Dividend Payments

According to the Icelandic Security Depository: Ex-dividend date is the day on which all shares bought and sold no longer come attached with the right to be paid the most recently declared dividend.

Dividend payments are added to forward contracts in two steps.

1. First they are entered into a Back Office Interface that saves them to a database table.
2. After the dividend payments are inserted into the database, the same job that insert interest payments on bond contracts picks them up and adds them to all open contracts with that particular underlying share.

Back office interface

In the back office web interface, users can insert/edit and disabled dividend payments. Users have to provide

• Symbol: market symbol of the share
• Ex Dividend Date Calculation Date:  the day on which all shares bought and sold no longer come attached with the right to be paid 
• Payment Date: When is the dividend payment paid out (and starts bearing interests).
• Dividend per share: Monetary value paid out per share of stock

Payments Job

Dividends job is triggered in Kodiak Derivatives Batch console application by passing "-dividend" as an argument.

Attaching dividend payments

The job goes through all enabled dividend payments that have Ex Dividend Date (CalcDate in the Database) less or equal today and attaches payments to all open forward contracts with the same underlying share and with SettlementDate less than the  CalcDate.