tjh290633 wrote:jackdaww wrote:does anyone have a list of stocks currently meeting these criteria please ?
It's easier to list those that haven't in my portfolio. The problem is special dividends and currency fluctuation, which affects the annual totals, and of course we are still in the reporting season, so not all results for 2019 are yet available.
I don't see much of a problem with currency fluctuations - just use the dividend amounts declared by the directors, in whatever currency they choose to use for their primary declarations of dividends. There would be a problem if the directors of a company took to manufacturing higher-than-really-justified percentage increases by (un)suitably choosing their dividend declaration currency each time, but dividend declaration currency changes are far too few and far-between for that to plausibly be happening.
I don't see all that much of a problem with special dividends either - basically, they're usually either accompanied by a share consolidation, or they're not and intended as genuine one-offs, or they're not and intended as parts of the company's regular dividend policy. Other than for tax purposes, treat one accompanied by a share consolidation as a compulsory purchase by the company of the shares lost to the consolidation for the amount of cash received as a result of the special dividend, assuming that's not too far off the market value of those lost shares at the time (it almost always is, but do check!). Treat the genuine one-offs as unexpected nice surprises, that no sensible shareholder would even expect to be repeated the next year, let alone grown, and so to be excluded when looking at the company's dividend growth record. Treat the ones intended to form parts of the company's regular dividend policy as ordinary dividends in all but name, and so to be included when looking at the company's dividend growth record - I tend to call them "not-so-specials" as a brief reminder of this ordinaries-in-all-but-name status.
It can be unclear which of the last two cases applies, of course - i.e. whether a special is intended to be part of the company's regular dividend policy or as a one-off. In that case, if a bit of poking around annual reports and RNSes doesn't clarify the intention, I would err on the conservative side and treat as a one-off to be excluded from the company's dividend growth record.
As regards being in a reporting season, we're more often in one than not! In particular, HYP companies with financial year ends of December 31st (the most common), March 31st (second most common), June 30th (e.g. BHP Group) and September 30th (e.g. Imperial Brands) all exist, and there's a scattering of others - e.g. Greene King's was around the end of April or start of May, the exact date jittering a bit from year to year because it used 52-week financial 'years' with an occasional one extended to 53 weeks to counteract the day-or-two drift per year through the calendar that would otherwise occur. With interim results tending to take a month or two to come out and finals two or three months, most if not all of the year is reporting season for at least a few companies!
I wouldn't personally regard having all the results in for a particular year number as especially important, because (for instance) BT's financial year ending March 31st, 2019 overlaps considerably more (9 months) with HSBC's financial year ending December 31st, 2018 (9 months overlap) than with HSBC's financial year ending December 31st, 2019 (3 months overlap). Because of the preponderance of December 31st and March 31st end dates of financial years, the time of year when one has the most generally up-to-date really detailed (*) information about a HYP's companies is probably (**) sometime in July, when the annual reports of all companies with December 31st year ends and all or nearly all of those with March 31st year ends are out - and those companies will be split as regards the year number they're up to! On the same measure, the time of year with the least generally up-to-date information is probably sometime in February, before at least the vast majority of companies with December 31st year ends have got their annual reports out. We're currently a bit over halfway from July to February, so we're probably just a bit worse off than average over the year by that measure.
(*) I.e. the level of detail in an annual report, which is generally quite a lot higher than in results announcements or interim reports.
(*) But only probably, since there's enough room for statistical variations that a HYP might have a sufficiently atypical distribution of year ends to change this.
Gengulphus
