Payout policy analysis

Three questions, in order. How much cash did the firm return? How much could it have returned? And do you trust management with the difference?

The first two are arithmetic and the script does them. The third is the judgment the whole analysis exists to support, and the script only scores the evidence for it.

The single most common error in this work is looking at dividends alone. Buybacks are roughly 60% of cash returned in the US. A firm with a 19% dividend payout ratio can be returning 83% of its earnings, and a firm with an 18% payout ratio can be unable to afford it. Add buybacks on both sides of every comparison before drawing a conclusion.

The script

resources/payout.py — pure standard library, no installation needed. Every subcommand takes JSON on stdin (or --in FILE) and prints JSON.