Dividends and understanding terms.

[Dirty Steve]

Hi!! I'm relatively new to dealing and brand new to this forum.
I had a bit of money sat around in my savings account so decided to get back into the market. I bought 4 different lots of shares, of which two havn't realy moved, ones shot up and ones gone down. My bad one is Shell. Its only 4% down so Im not too concerned but just have a few questions.

1) Dividends.
Shell announced in the FT the other day its dividend payment.
"Notice is hereby given that a balance of the register will be struck on Friday, 2nd April 2004 for the preparation of warrants for a final dividend for the year 2003 of 9.65p per 25p Ordinary share payable on thursday 6th May 2004.
For transferees to recieve this dividend, their transfers must be lodged with the Company's Registrar not later than 3pm on Friday 2nd April 2004."

Does this mean that providing I still own the shares at 3pm on 2nd April I will automatically recieve the dividend??? When can I first safely sell and be sure of recieving the dividend? And how can you find information of when other companys pay their dividend?

2) What does ex Div mean?

3) what do these terms mean:
P/E
% Yield
P/TBV

Sorry a lot of questions there. Hope someone can help.

Thanks!

 

[BBB]

2/ex DIVidend - the stock is past its holding date that entitles the owner to receive the dividend

1/ yes you should receive the div if you owned the stock on 2/4/02

3/ Price/Earnings ratio - self explanatory?? The price of the stock in relation to its earnings. I may be wrong here, but a P/E of around 20 is a benchmark for NASDAQ stocks, not sure about LSE

try www.ft.com, search on google etc to be sure. I don't really look at this stuff so I'm not the best source of info about the others.