Dividends
When will my dividends go up?
Posted by admin on December 9, 2009 in Dividends
Standard & Poor’s reported that it anticipates dividend payers in the S & P 500 to raise their dividends by 6.1% in 2010. This would represent the first time since 2007 that dividends were raised. Assuming this comes to pass, what dividend yielding stocks will raise their dividends faster than others? What are some key [...]
Are fortress level of capital good for dividend investors?
Posted by admin on November 24, 2009 in Dividends
Manulife Financial, one of the world’s largest insurers, surprised the investing world last week by announcing it was raising $2.5 billion dollars in a common share issuance less than a year after raising $2.5 billion of common shares. The new CEO of Manulife has long maintained that it seeks a “fortress” level balance sheet; whether [...]
What does dividend yield tell us about the economy?
Posted by admin on November 18, 2009 in Dividends
Chasing abnormally high dividend yield is typically seen as a sign of imprudent dividend investing. Since dividend yield is ratio of annual dividend payment to share price, an abnormally high dividend yield generally indicates the share price has collapsed or the dividend paid is quite high, leading to questions about sustainability and future growth. But, [...]
How effective are dividend stocks in downturns?
Posted by admin on October 27, 2009 in Dividends
If history is any indication, economically disruptive rescission, like the 1991 variety, tend to produce two things in their wake. There is a predictable increase in companies reporting losses or profits based mostly on cost-cutting initially and, correspondingly, companies begin to be creative in their financial reporting to meeting earnings expectations. However, studies continue to [...]
Are dividend ETFs redundant?
Posted by admin on October 14, 2009 in Dividends
Numerous studies have found that the number of dividend paying stocks continue to decline. Not surprisingly, this has resulted in an increasing concentration of dividend paying stocks in large cap indexes as medium to small cap indexes tend to have members with characteristics not conducive to paying shareholder dividends: mainly lower profitability and less reliable [...]
Where have all the dividend payers gone?
Posted by admin on October 8, 2009 in Dividends
If you read dividend blogs, you may think to yourself: “they all discuss the same stocks!” This perception may actually be true. Academic studies have shown that the number of dividend payers has declined for decades. Internationally, the proportion of dividend payers to publicly listed companies has decreased from 86.9% to 53.3% between 1985 and [...]
Which stocks outperform in a recovery?
Posted by admin on August 20, 2009 in Dividends, Investment Products, Investment Strategy
File this post under “obscure personal finance reading” or “why dividend stocks continue to be your best bet.” A Swedish undergraduate research paper written earlier this year posed the question of what quantitative measures an investor should look at in determining which stocks will outperform the market in the 12 months after the end of [...]
Does tax policy affect dividend payouts?
Posted by admin on July 2, 2009 in Dividends
At the end of 2010, the temporary 15% tax rate on dividend income is set to expiry in the United States, barring a further extension by the Obama administration. An end of this tax cut would return the dividend tax to its pre-2003 rate of 35%. What effect, if any, did the initial 20% cut [...]
Should dividend investors be worried about too many preferred shares being issued?
Posted by admin on May 21, 2009 in Dividends
Along with quality fixed income instruments, the preference or preferred share are the issuance du jour in the markets. Paying a set dividend of well above the prime rate (most recently issued bank preferred shares are now paying between 6- 6.25% per annum until their reset date) and not as prone to wide variation in [...]
Comparing dividend yields vs. bond yields
Posted by admin on May 11, 2009 in Dividends
Frequent readers of dividend blogs will know that most sophisticated dividend stock investors compare dividend yields to bond yields (or high yield money market funds) as one quantitative measure of assessing risk and valuation (see Dividends4life’s analysis of Johnson and Johnson as an example). But what are we to make of the strange behavior between [...]
