What is the ex-div? Whether you’re capturing dividends, or….actually, I’m not sure why else you’d want to know. Probably for option call selling. You wouldn’t want to write a call wherein the premium is less than the dividend being paid, since you’ll just get exercised.

Anyway, ex-div is the day you can sell your shares of a stock while still collecting the most recent dividend.

If you’re buying stocks for the dividend, you want to buy BEFORE the ex-div date, so you can receive the dividend.

So why not just buy stocks before the ex-div date, then sell on the ex-div date? Because the price will drop on the ex-div date. roughly equal to or exceeding the dividend that was just paid.

There are actually strategies based around capturing dividends, but we’re not getting into that here. Maybe in another article.

Ex-Div TLDR

BUY before ex-div
SELL after ex-div