Dividend Increases/Decreases for the Week Ending September 4
September 7, 2015
Below we provide a list of firms that raised/lowered their dividends during the week ending September 4. The dividend reports of covered firms on this list will be updated shortly with the new information. To access our dividend reports use the ‘Symbol’ search box in our website header. Firms Raising Their Dividends This Week Avago Technologies (AVGO): now $0.42 per share quarterly dividend, was $0.40. Eastgroup Properties (EGP): now $0.60 per share quarterly dividend, was $0.57. General Growth Properties (GGP): now $0.18 per share quarterly dividend, was $0.17. IXYS (IXYS): now $0.04 per share quarterly dividend, was $0.035. Ladder Capital (LADR): now $0.275 per share quarterly dividend, was $0.25. National Storage Affiliates (NSA): now $0.19 per share quarterly dividend, was
Unemployment Rate Falls to 5.1%! Great Times in America!
September 4, 2015
Image Source: BLS The future is all that matters. This is a basic tenet of the stock market, where prices of equities are forward-looking discounting mechanisms. August is now over, and we learned that the job market in the United States is close to the healthiest it has been in a long time—that is, if you buy into the data calculations behind the national unemployment rate, which now stands at a 5.1%. The mark is the lowest level since the Great Recession of late last decade and is now roughly half the levels experienced at the “height” of the Great Recession, which drove 10% of Americans that were willing to work out of a job. The Fed has worked a
Bond Issuance Has Ground to a Halt; Expect Negative 2016 GDP Impact
September 3, 2015
The Fed is in a tight spot. We give Ben Bernanke and team a lot of credit for successfully delaying a prolonged global economic recession following the worst financial crisis of our generation late last decade, one that swallowed up such household names as GM (GM) and AIG (AIG), but such policies always come with unintended consequences. New Fed Chair Janet Yellen may have to deal with the true aftermath, and it’s been thrust upon her, perhaps unfairly. With interest rates on fixed-income products near the lowest they’ve been in history, retirees and near-retirees, after suffering significant capital losses during the Financial Crisis, have been lured into higher-yielding dividend-paying equities, the prices of some almost completely supported by debt-infused dividend
Quantifying Apple’s Tremendous Investment Case
September 3, 2015
A prolonged period of low interest rates has driven income investors to dividend growth investing as a way to achieve retirement goals. Traditional dividend growth analysis has rested on evaluating a company’s dividend payout ratio and its track record of historical consecutive annual dividend increases. A supplement to these approaches, the forward-looking, cash-flow- based Dividend Cushion ratio maps a company’s future expected free cash flows to its future expected cash dividends paid (after considering balance sheet health) and has shown to be a superior indicator of both dividend growth (risk) and total return relative to other dividend growth analytical processes. The results in this paper showcase the outperformance of a select number of high-yielding equities with strong Dividend Cushion ratios
Extreme Volatility in Crude Oil Prices Continues
September 2, 2015
After a short-lived reprieve on hopes that OPEC will suddenly abandon its strategy of share retention instead of price support and that US oil production was modestly lower through the first five months of the year than previously expected, reality is now setting back into the oil futures market (USO). At the time of this writing, West Texas Intermediate crude oil prices for October delivery are hovering in the $43-$45 per barrel range, and futures have traded wildly between “recession” and “bull market” the past several months and days, respectively. There are three major areas of concern that may continue to impede any sustainable rise in crude oil prices, however. 1. OPEC is not caving in. OPEC’s strategy to deal
Batten Down the Hatches – Another US Market Crash Probable
September 1, 2015
A global financial contagion like that of the Financial Crisis just six short years ago cannot be ruled out. The magnitude of wealth lost in China’s (FXI) equity market is simply staggering, and we’re already witnessing bad loans soar across China’s Big 4 banks. We’re hearing that property, used as collateral for stock margin trading in China, is often being sold for 90 cents on the dollar as speculators look to cover losses. We expect the fallout from the collapse in Chinese equity markets to eventually reverberate through their property markets, impacting loan-to-values in the commercial and residential arenas, sparking significant loss rates and asset write-downs across the Chinese financial system. We continue to assess the tangible evidence of an
5 High-Yielding Strong Dividend Growth Stocks for the Long Haul
August 31, 2015
We’ve never been more concerned about the financial health of dividend growth investors. Perhaps we’re partly to blame for some of the excitement surrounding the strategy that has taken many corners of the web by storm, but we continue to believe it is important for investors to strive to understand the strategy’s fundamental fallacies, which can’t be talked about enough as a means of helping investors understand key risks. For those new to dividend growth investing, part of the strategy centers on identifying stocks that pay dividends that are poised to increase over the long haul, generating in time a yield (a payout) that is a) sufficient on the cost and b) sufficient to generate an adequate income in retirement
Dividend Increases/Decreases for the Week Ending August 28
August 31, 2015
Below we provide a list of firms that raised/lowered their dividends during the week ending August 28. The dividend reports of covered firms on this list will be updated shortly with the new information. To access our dividend reports use the ‘Symbol’ search box in our website header. Firms Raising Their Dividends This Week Bank of Nova Scotia (BNS): now C$0.70 per share quarterly dividend, was C$0.68. Blackhawk Bancorp (BHWB): now $0.04 per share quarterly dividend, was $0.02. Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CM): now C$1.12 per share quarterly dividend, was C$1.09. CrossAmerica Partners (CAPL): now $0.5625 per share quarterly dividend, was $0.5475. Educational Development Corporation (EDUC): now $0.09 per share quarterly dividend, was $0.08. EMC Insurance (EMCI): now $0.17
3 Observations
August 28, 2015
Bulls raged back in a big way during the week of trading ending August 28 to erase some of the massive losses experienced from the May 2015 highs of 2,013 on the S&P 500. Though no longer staring down at 1,800, the S&P 500 still closed comfortably shy of 2,000. No matter what next week will bring, almost everybody is expecting more volatility. Could this then mean that we’re back to normal? The market has a very interesting way of disappointing the majority of investors the majority of the time. Here are 3 observations that are worth noting. 1. The Fed Doesn’t Have the Right Data…Yet The stark reality is one of two things: a) either the Fed knows exactly what’s going on
Forget About the New iPhone; The Banks in China!
August 28, 2015
One thing will always be the case – banks never hold enough capital to cover asset losses in excess of the inverse of their leverage. Said differently, if a bank is leveraged 10 to 1–meaning its assets are 10 times as much as its equity–it would only take a 10% decline in the unhedged market-value of asset prices to wipe a bank’s equity capital position clean, all else equal, and provided capital infusions aren’t available. The US lived through this dynamic during the Financial Crisis, and to the credit of the Fed, Treasury, and related participants, they did a fantastic job, all things considered–being that we’re not currently in the midst of a modern-day Great Depression. It is clear to
