Finance Pulse

Methodology & Data Sources

What we compute

Real yield is the dividend yield left over after local inflation erodes the value of the payout. For a foreign investor we further adjust for the 1-year move of the stock-country currency against their home currency.

real_yield_local = (1 + nominal_yield) / (1 + inflation) − 1
real_yield_for_investor = (1 + real_yield_local) × (1 + fx_change) − 1

This is the standard Fisher correction. We use the exact form rather than the common shortcut nominal − inflation; at the yield magnitudes involved (2–8%) the difference is already 10–30 basis points.

Data sources

Dividend yield
Yahoo Finance (yfinance) — pulls dividendYield and trailingAnnualDividendYield directly from each ticker's info payload. Refreshed daily at 02:30 UTC.
Inflation (CPI)
World Bank API for annual CPI (indicator FP.CPI.TOTL.ZG), refreshed on the 1st of every month. FRED is used where monthly CPI is available — CPALTT01xxM659N series for JP, KR, ID, IN, US, GB, EU. TH, MY, SG, PH fall back to the annual World Bank series; Taiwan is not covered by either (not a WB member and not in FRED's OECD monthly feed).
FX rates
Yahoo Finance daily close for all USD pairs we need. 5 years of history is maintained so the 1-year currency change is always available for the cross-rate between any stock-country and investor-country currency.

Update cadence

  • 02:00–02:30 UTC daily — stock prices, FX, dividend yields
  • 03:00 UTC daily — recompute stock_real_yields, currency_adjusted_yields, country_real_yield_ranking from the latest raw data
  • Monday 05:00 UTC weekly — FRED monthly CPI pull
  • 1st of month 04:00 UTC — World Bank annual CPI pull

Known limitations and confidence flags

  • Coverage — we currently track ~250 dividend- paying large caps across 11 markets, biased toward the large caps most of our readers hold. Small and mid caps, plus many REITs outside Singapore, are not yet in the database.
  • Inflation freshness — World Bank CPI lags 1–3 months. For countries without FRED monthly coverage (TH/MY/SG/ PH) the real yield uses a stale annual print; in a rapidly changing inflation regime this can mislead.
  • Taiwan — no CPI from either source. Taiwanese tickers appear in stock tables but country ranking for Taiwan is suppressed. A DGBAS scraper is on the backlog.
  • Dividend yield is trailing — the Yahoo payload is backward-looking. Recent cuts or specials can distort the snapshot until the next regular payment resets the trailing figure.
  • FX change is a point-to-point 1Y delta, not volatility-adjusted. It says nothing about future currency moves.

What we are NOT doing

  • Not forecasting future yields or currencies.
  • Not adjusting for withholding tax — real yield for a non-resident investor will be lower than shown after local dividend withholding.
  • Not applying personal tax. Numbers are gross; your bracket is your own.
  • Not a buy/sell recommendation. This is a data reference, not investment advice.

Questions / corrections

Found a number that looks wrong? The raw collected data and run history are logged — spotting drift is helpful. Contact details are on the About page.