#dividends

On the ex-dividend date the share price drops by roughly the dividend. The cash did not appear from nowhere, it moved out of the share and into your account, and in a taxable account it moved through a tax on the way. Which is also why dividend capture fails twice over.

A REIT is a company legally forced to hand almost all its profit back to you every year. That one rule explains the fat 4% dividend, the odd tax bill, the interest-rate whiplash, and why you value it on FFO instead of earnings.

A buyback is a company spending cash to buy its own stock, shrinking the share count so profits divide among fewer shares. That's it. Whether it creates value or just flatters EPS comes down to one thing: the price paid. The announcement is noise. The execution is the story.