That's another valid point. Statistics are statistics -- a snapshot in time -- and don't necessarily reflect "right now". On the numbers I posted I listed January 23rd, a couple of days ago. How can you know if there wasn't some breaking news that raised or lowered the expected value of a company? Unless there's a newswire and a rule to report material information you cannot.
Actually as an aside GLBSE was about to implement a newswire for it's securities, and this is one area where BitFunder is clearly ahead of the competition. It has a newswire. It is for reasons like this that I've chosen to list my securities exclusively on BitFunder. I feel it keeps issuers honest. If something were to happen to a security on BitFunder and the issuer didn't disclose it, it would be tantamount to fraud. I know it's not seen that way now, but it will be soon. There needs to be a newswire for any exchange IMO.
Come on man. LTC-MINING, SYNERGY, & COGNITIVE are excellent companies, but you have to exclude the balloon payments made when they were relisted on BTC-TC in your math...unless of course you think burnside will be paying out 43.501BTC every other week? Actual APY on LTC-MINING based on last dividend was 2.153BTC/1000=0.002153BTC/share / 12(average days between dividends) = 0.00017942BTC/day / .37(7dAvg) = 0.04849099% daily yield * 365 days = 17.69921171% APY.
Your math is way off on several assets because you didn't exclude one time payments...among other problems.
Yes, "...some securities which have recently listed may have paid out a catch-up payment, and therefore the dividend yield statistic is not a reliable indicator of dividend yield going forward."
Statistics is not easy. It seems a good idea to exclude the first "catch-up" payment and run a calculation based on that. But it would in fact be more flawed than what I did above. If you look at statistics from a shorter time period, the error from weekly payments creeps in. Some securities pay weekly, some daily, and on different days. This means if a company pays early or late by two days than another company, the numbers will be off by as much as 6 or 7%. Actually, using the 90 day statistic and leaving in the first payment is a better judge of which companies pay more dividend because it fairly compares companies over the same time period (since GLBSE closed down). So while the numbers themselves are almost certainly wrong, at least we can order them comparatively by their historical rate. This is a good start; the actual numbers may be different but now we can start at the top of the list and start analyzing other factors such as transparency and trustworthiness.