Optuma EOD Splits, Consolidations and Total Returns
Overview
Optuma EOD Data includes adjustments for Share Splits, Consolidations, as well as factors for Total Returns. Optuma supports 3 different display types for these adjustments…
- Price Returns (Default): The chart will display with all exchange issued back adjustments applied to the chart.
- Total Returns: Total return shows the chart with all distributions taken into consideration (distribution of dividends (if a stock), coupons (if a bond), or capital gains (if a fund), etc). Access to this option requires Optuma 2 or higher.
- Unadjusted: No adjustments are applied, the chart values are the raw Open, High, Low, Close as they occurred on each day.
Display Options for Optuma 2.0 or higher
The property to toggle the charts display style between Price Returns, Total Returns, and Unadjusted can be found in the title bar, along the top of the charts window.
Clicking on this toggle will display a drop-down selector with each available option.
Note: This drop-down will not appear in the charts title bar if no split / total return data is available.
Below is an example of how the 3 different options affect the charts view:
Watchlists
From Optuma 2.1 and later, Watchlists support using Price Returns / Total Returns and Unadjusted data.
This can have an effect on any scripts applied to the watchlist. In the following example you can see the variations changing the price adjustment setting can have on a 225 Simple Moving Average script.
Display Options for Optuma v1.6 or lower
Occasionally companies announce stock splits, such as a 2-for-1, where the stock price is halved but stock holders end up with twice as many shares. This means that yesterday you had 1,000 shares at $50, but following the 2-for-1 split today you have 2,000 shares at $25 each.
At Optuma we back-adjust the stock’s price history so that if the high last year was $40 it will be adjusted to $20 to take into account the dilution - and also so that there isn’t a 50% price drop on the chart that didn’t really happen.
However, some clients wishing to analyse pre-split charts and look at previous important price levels where the stock was traded are able to ignore these price adjustments via the chart’s Filters - Ignore Dilutions property. Click or right-click on any bar to bring up the option:
In this example of Microsoft - which has had several stock splits since 1987 - you can see the difference between the split-adjusted data and the unadjusted data in these logarithmic charts, with the split events highlighted in yellow.
As you can see, in the adjusted data MSFT is currently at all-time highs at $131, but in fact MSFT traded at $180 in 1998 before subsequently going through two 2-for-1 splits. This means that the prices were adjusted by dividing by two in 1999 for the first split, and dividing again after the second split in 2003. As such, following the two 2-for-1 splits the $180 was adjusted to $45.