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Comment by xpuente | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps the cause was that the ex-date of the latest dividend was 06/14/2021 [1]

[1] https://ycharts.com/companies/KO/dividend

Explanation: In order to be eligible for the dividend of $0.42/share, you had to be holding the stock on Friday at close. You would therefore normally expect the share price to drop $0.42 between Friday close and Monday open.

Looks like that accounts for about half of the "drop", which means KO lost less than 1% over the weekend. Hardly worth a news article.

That would acccount for about half of the drop between Friday close and Monday open, nice catch!

Journalist narratives behind stock price action are almost always wrong or misleading.

"behind stock price action" seems irrelevant to that sentence :)

Additionally, Pogba did the same with Heineken yesterday. Yet that stock (HEIA:AMS [0]) went up 1.39% today, without any other clear signals that would cause the stock to go up that much.

Correlated (maybe even caused by)? Who knows, it is the stock market after all, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

[0]: https://live.euronext.com/en/product/equities/NL0000009165-X...

wouldn't this be something already arbed out? Dividend dates are known -- one can make a quick buck shorting if one knows for sure the price will change.

No, because if you short at close on ex-dividend and buy back at open the next day, ceteris paribus you gain the stock price delta (which is exactly equal to the dividend), but you also owe the amount of the dividend to the person you borrowed the stock from. You end up netting nothing.

ah that makes sense, ty very much

It is pretty visible in most instruments. If you're calculating a simple expected price of a stock at the open it's pretty normal to take the closing price from the prior trade day and adjust it based on any corporate actions (dividends, splits, ...).

Now whether or not this is actually the price that the instrument will trade at is a different story, but it's a good initial estimate. Market data and other activity will quickly inform you as to the actual price.

The price is adjusted on ex-dividend day. You can attempt to arb dividends with options, but the algos will beat you.

Sort of. There’s taxation différences that vary based on where the account holder is based, so the drop won’t exactly equal the dividend amount, even if it was paid immediately.

If you short, you'll pay both interest AND dividends on that stock.

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