Ex-dividend date trade with Novartis

As I discussed on Feb 22 that you can make some quick money by trading good stocks per their ex-dividend date. One immediate opportunity I talked about was Novartis (NVS). Well, if you did take the opportunity, you should be happy to at least pocket a few hundred dollars for just a few days of holding NVS stocks. Here is the one month chart of Novartis:

Novartis only pays one dividend per year and it is $2.53 for this year. Feb 26 was its ex-dividend date. Do you notice what happened to NVS price on Feb 26? It came down from $69 to below $67. As I said, the stock price will be adjusted downward to reflect the dividend amount on the ex-dividend date. So this price drop was not really that NVS did poorly on Feb 26; it was just a mathematical adjustment. But see how NVS did in the next few days? Its share price quickly returned to its price prior to the ex-dividend date and if you further held it for longer, you could make more, given it is trading at $71 now. In a nutshell, if you had NVS shares on Feb 25, you will get $2.53 per share early April and depending on how long you held its shares, you could make more with additional capital gains.

Remember, we are just talking about a few days to weeks of buying some good companies' stocks with good dividends. If you can find good companies and do this every month, cumulatively this could be a good income stream over time. By the way, I just did this for Two Harbors (TWO), a mortgage REIT company with a high yield.