Capturing dividends--the path to low risk returns?

For a long time I have been intrigued with instantaneous jumps or in trader parlance "gaps" in stock prices. As near as I can tell there are 3 sources of these sorts of jumps where a stock price makes no attempt to trade at intermediate values, but rather pops up or falls immediately to a new level:

1. News surprises (e.g. due to earnings warnings, analyst upgrades, business deals, market panics),
2. Large blocks of stocks being bought or sold, and
3. Dividends. Dividends are interesting because they are announced ahead of time to happen on a certain date. On the "ex-dividend" date any shareholder that owned the stock prior to that day becomes eligible to receive a stated amount of money per share of stock that they own. It doesn't matter if you have owned the stock for one day before or 5 years --that money shows up in your brokerage account typically a couple of weeks later on the "distribution date".

The first two are inherently unpredictable, but wiht dividends, at least the date, and usually the amount is predictable.

With dividends the amount of money can be significant--for example NAT just paid out a dividend of $1.88 on a stock that was trading around $36 -- a 5.2% payout. At 1st glance this looks like a great deal, but like all things on Wall Street there is no free lunch. For starters, at opening, the day that the dividend is locked in--the ex-dividend date-- the stock typically drops an amount that is equivalent to the dividend. So, if you buy the stock to collect the dividend, you need to remember that the stock+dividend price at opening on the ex-dividend day will give you about a wash. The fun then begins as to whether the stock bounces back up to the previous day's level or drops due to participation in the general market action. Welcome to day trading....

Because of this dependence on market action, just buying stocks to capture the dividends is an iffy deal. I will write more posts on this subject detailing some of my attempts at capturing dividends without being immediately embroiled in market action.