Yield River — is today's dividend yield high or low versus its own history
Is a 5% yield high? Ordinary for a bank, rare for a chip designer. The yield river puts a stock's cash yield back into its own historical percentile bands — where today sits, and how far from the historically-rich zone. Bands accrue from daily official valuation snapshots, compounding in depth over time.
How the bands are built
Daily official yield snapshots accumulate into a per-stock historical distribution, cut at fixed percentiles (10/25/50/75/90) to form the river. Same snapshot substrate as the PER river: historical dates return as-of versions, so backtests never see later revisions.
A high yield is not a buy case
Yields usually spike for one of two reasons: the price fell, or a one-off special dividend was paid. Neither means the business got cheaper, and both look identical on a yield chart.
The river answers one question only, which is where today sits relative to this stock's own history. Whether the payout is sustainable is a fundamental judgement the chart cannot make for you.
Want the payout turned into a value rather than a percentile? The dividend discount model runs Gordon growth on the same dividend history, next to a discounted cash flow and the Peter Lynch fair value, each as a pessimistic to optimistic range with the growth and discount rate on sliders. Where the dividend figure is implied from the official yield rather than taken from an announcement, the page says so next to the number.