Financial Friday: Using Perplexity to Calculate Dividends

One of the questions that may be posed when musing over your stock portfolio is about stock dividends. Often, the information provided by brokerages is misleading or incomplete. For example, our brokerage, Schwab, only aggregates dividends and provides simplistic results, such as the dividend return is the total amount of dividends divided by the cost of stocks. This neglects the compounding effect of using a stock’s DRIP (Dividend Reinvestment Program).

To address this situation, I am going to use actual numbers from a stock in our portfolio, Trinity Capital, with ticker symbol TRIN. In this example, I want to know what is provided in the following Prompt and provide results in a table format that follows. Note that instead of a static $1970.13 in quarterly dividends, the last quarter in 2026 TRIN paid out $2252.04 in dividends with a total payout of $10,488.41.

Prompt: Current date 10/31/2025. We own 3863 shares of BDC TRIN, which are in their DRIP. Calculate quarterly dividends and construct a table with values of dividend, # shares DRIP, total number of shares held, and total dividends paid to date, all through the last payment in December 2026.

Here is the table limited to only the months in which TRIN pays its regular dividends—December, March, June, and September. It includes dividend paid, the number of new shares added via DRIP, total shares after reinvestment, and cumulative total dividends paid through the last payment in December 2026.

TRIN DRIP Table (Dividend Months Only: Dec, Mar, Jun, Sep)

• Only dividend-paying months are listed, matching TRIN’s expected payout pattern.

• “Shares DRIP” is the rounded estimate of new shares bought using the dividend (assumes a $15 share price).
• Dividends and share totals are cumulative and project only regular quarterly payouts. Supplemental or variable dividends are not included.

These updated values illustrate your DRIP growth and total dividends by each quarter through the end of 2026.​