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A corporate action is an elective activity that impacts the shareholders and/or bondholders of a company, for example a dividend, stock split or spin off.

You can create a corporate action source in LUSID and upload your stream of corporate actions from an external service provider to it. You can then subscribe any number of transaction portfolios to the corporate action source, and LUSID automatically applies actions to portfolios with affected holdings on appropriate dates.

For example, you could upload a corporate action representing a Microsoft dividend of $0.17 per share with an ex-dividend date of 13 February and a payment date of 17 February. For each portfolio with a holding in Microsoft on 13 February, LUSID automatically increases the USD cash balance by 17 cents per unit held on 17 February. See this in action.

Note: You can optionally use LUSID to calculate and apply withholding and other taxes. See an example.

For now, you can model any kind of corporate action as a TransitionEvent by considering the impact of inputs (the number and cost basis of units currently held) on outputs (the number and cost basis of future units, in the same instrument or in different ones). In future, dedicated types of corporate action (such as CashDividendEvent, StockSplitEvent and AmortisationEvent) will make this process simpler.

Providing you have appropriate permissions, you can create a corporate action source and upload corporate actions to it using the LUSID web app, via the Data Management > Corporate Actions dashboard:

Alternatively, you can perform these operations programmatically:

Explanation: See the big picture

Tutorials: Get started by doing something tangible

How-to guides: Get something done

Keywords: corporate actions