Hallo TooFuzzy,
I did notice that for SPY the Closing Price on the day of the Dividend issue was about 0.2 % lower than the Closing price the day before, but maybe that means nothing. The Opening Price on the issue day may have been much higher and the deduction of the Dividend Delta Price may have been wiped out by optimistic investors, so the effect of the dividend can not be determined by looking the de Closing Price, because that price is determined by the investors.
I do the same as you do with the dividends in my SPY Demo Run: I add the money on the Reserve and let it go at that, for the ROTAC Yield Method. The extra cash is treated as a capital investment, just like the cash portion of any Starting AIM is treated as Investment. I correct for the time effect of the added cash as well to get a Time Averaged Capital (TAC). This method also corrects for Capital Addition if I add for example $ 10000 after the AIM has already been running for a while. The Yield is called ROTAC.
For the ROTAI Method I also make a dividend correction because I treat the money I receive from the dividend as being a payout from the equity and it is treated the same way as if I sell some shares. . . For the ROTAI this is a negative investment and it makes the Time Averaged Investment a bit smaller, and that makes the yield a little larger.
