When Must I Buy a Stock to Get the Dividend?

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- The one question I hear most often about dividends is when do I have to buy a stock in order to receive the payment? The answer is more complicated than you would think. The company doesn't tell you this date when the dividend is announced and it's not published on the quote pages of TheStreet.com, Yahoo Finance or even the expensive Bloomberg terminal on my desk. That is, until I coined the term "must-own date" over a decade ago. Terms like "record date" and "ex-date" a...