What Is a Personalized Strategy Score? Scoring Your Canadian Dividend Portfolio

A portfolio can hold twelve dividend-paying Canadian stocks, generate a respectable yield, and still be structurally weaker than a portfolio half its size. Yield alone does not tell you whether the income is spread across sectors, whether reinvested dividends are buying the shares they are meant to buy, or whether the payments are growing. Most investors only find out the hard way, during a sector-wide dividend cut.

The Personalized Strategy Score exists to answer a broader question than any single metric can: taken as a whole, how well-built are your holdings for the income strategy they are supposed to serve? It is calculated at the user level. It reads every active holding across all of your portfolios together, not one portfolio in isolation.

This post explains what goes into the score, how the six parts are combined, when the score is unavailable, and how to read it over time. It does not publish sample scores, because a number only means something when it comes from your own holdings.

The problem: two portfolios, same yield, different structure

Suppose two Ontario investors each hold a $150,000 portfolio yielding 4.90%. These are hypothetical portfolios used only to illustrate the factors.

Portfolio A spreads that yield across twelve holdings in six different sectors: banks, utilities, pipelines, telecom, insurance, and REITs. Most of its holdings have a record of raising their dividends.

Portfolio B reaches the same hypothetical yield with six holdings concentrated in energy and one high-yield split-share fund, with little dividend growth history.

Both portfolios report the same headline income today. If one sector faces a downturn, Portfolio B has far less room to absorb a dividend cut, because a much larger share of its value sits in fewer names and fewer sectors. A yield-only comparison would treat these two portfolios as equivalent. They are not, and that difference is what a portfolio-level score is designed to surface.

The six factors behind the score

The Personalized Strategy Score combines six sub-scores into one overall reading:

Each factor is worth understanding on its own terms, because each one answers a different question about the portfolio.

Coverage

The Coverage factor is derived from DRIP Share Coverage. For each holding, DRIP Share Coverage asks whether one dividend payment buys the target number of whole shares you set for that holding. The monthly average across your holdings is then scored using the Coverage Ratio System bands.

That makes Coverage a reinvestment measure. It does not compare your dividends with your spending, and it does not read any personal goal. Prospyr uses recorded coverage snapshots for the month when they exist and the live coverage resolver when they do not.

Income Schedule Completeness

This factor looks at your income-paying holdings and asks whether each one has a complete, verified dividend schedule. A holding whose schedule is missing or malformed counts as incomplete and reduces the factor. It measures how well the income is mapped, which matters because later planning depends on knowing when payments arrive.

Growth

Growth reads the change in total portfolio value from the latest snapshot in the prior month to the current month. Current value is taken from a snapshot when one exists, or from live market value plus cash when it does not. This is a value change, not an investment return. Because it compares total value, new contributions and withdrawals can move it as well as price changes.

DRIP Health

DRIP Health reads the month's income snapshot and asks what share of the new income came from dividend reinvestment rather than from fresh contributions. A higher reinvestment-driven share places the factor in a higher band.

Diversification

Diversification finds the single sector holding the largest share of your market value. The more concentrated that largest sector is, the lower the factor. It does not count holdings; it reads where the money actually sits.

Dividend Growth Rate

The DGR factor weights each holding's dividend growth rate by the income that holding produces, so a large income position counts for more than a small one. The resulting income-weighted growth rate is placed into a band.

How the six factors are combined

The factors are weighted rather than averaged equally. Coverage carries the most weight. Income Schedule Completeness comes next. Growth and DRIP Health follow, and Diversification and DGR carry the least.

The weighted total is normalized into a single overall reading. The ordering reflects what the score is built to reward: reinvestment that actually buys shares, and income that is fully mapped, ahead of short-term value movement. A portfolio cannot reach a strong overall reading on one factor alone.

When the score is unavailable

If any one of the six inputs cannot be calculated for the month, the overall score is unavailable. Prospyr does not publish a partial score built from the factors that happened to resolve. A holding without a usable market value, a month without an income snapshot, or holdings with no dividend growth data can each leave the score unavailable until the missing input exists.

This is deliberate. A score quietly assembled from four or five factors would look like the full reading while measuring something different.

Reading the score correctly

A lower reading is not a verdict that the portfolio is failing. It is a diagnostic that points to which factor is holding the total back. A portfolio with strong diversification but several incomplete payment schedules has a specific, fixable gap, which is filling in verified schedules, rather than a vague problem.

Returning to the illustration, Portfolio A would tend to read better on Diversification and DGR, because its value is spread across sectors and its holdings have raised dividends. Portfolio B would tend to read weaker on the same two factors. Neither portfolio's Coverage, schedule completeness, or DRIP Health can be inferred from yield at all, which is exactly why those factors are measured separately.

Comparing the score across time, not just across portfolios

Prospyr keeps one score record per user, per month, and per score version, and shows the history as a trend. The most useful read is often the direction over several months rather than any single reading.

An investor who adds a new sector or trims a concentrated position should expect the Diversification factor to respond in a later month. An investor who completes missing payment schedules should expect Income Schedule Completeness to respond. Watching the trend move after a specific change is a more concrete signal of progress than one reading in isolation.

Comparing holdings with the Dividend Compare Engine

The Dividend Compare Engine sets two holdings side by side on income, after-tax income, DRIP coverage, and dividend growth. That can help you research the holding-level inputs that later feed several factors.

The Compare Engine does not calculate the Personalized Strategy Score, and it does not predict how a change would move it. The score is calculated from your actual holdings, snapshots, and schedules for the month.

Takeaway

Two portfolios can report the same yield and carry very different structure, because yield says nothing about sector concentration, reinvestment, schedule quality, or dividend growth. The Personalized Strategy Score reads six factors: Coverage, Income Schedule Completeness, Growth, DRIP Health, Diversification, and DGR. It combines them with Coverage weighted most, and it stays unavailable rather than guessing when an input is missing. A lower reading is not a failing grade; it identifies which specific factor to address next.