Ummmm... well, TD has an area dedicated to designating (quickly with checkboxes) which stocks to drip or not... buried in the fine print is the discount info on dripping positions that don't offer discounts to direct buyers or indirect, i.e., indirect being when you buy and/or hold a stock in a brokerage account, some companies require that you buy directly from them to get a drip discount.... so 10 or 20 years -- I really don't remember, my brokerages (I started with Jack White in the 1980s which got bought out several times, ending up with the TD brand), sent out a notice/fine print sort of thing but the headline news was offering a slightly lower discount (4% is what I get) for stocks that don't offer discounts, while acct. holders could still enroll in direct drips with companies that had that for the full 5% discount... again, I can't remember, but Fido followed suit not too long after that... I guess I could take a screen shot of the TD pages, but I'd wager their website for non-acct. holders touts it as an available feature for prospective acct holders.
One recent example I can provide is with a preferred stock I've had for a long time, LTS/A... never offered a drip -- at least not to me -- just was not available, period. A few months ago, as I was adjusting/tweaking drips (I only have 6-10 usually these days) I fat fingered an option/checkbox and accidentally enabled DRIP on LTS/A... it's a monthly payer and the next month, instead of the cash divvy, I got some full and partial shares via TD's in-house drip feature... just as a test, I tried it in my Fido acct, also with LTS/A (I have half a position in both accts., which gets me a combined full position) and the next month got shares and partials instead of cash... now back to cash in both, but that removed the last DRIP impediment on any holding I have or once had... this makes life simpler and easier: they literally will DRIP anything as far as I can tell and for a discount in-house if the actual company doesn't offer their own drip discount.
One reason I'd never worried or thought about dripping LTS/A over the years is that for a long time it was my only pure income play... then I got busy with CEFs a couple years ago for a monthly income boost... since then, throttled it all back, selling out some CEFs and redeploying to positions more familiar to divvy income/divvy growth as long as they paid 3%-4% with good 5-yr divvy growth, too. |
