The Lemon Fool

As per previous months I have tried to separate the HYP shares from the others, apologies for any erroneous omissions or inclusions. Payments first:


And these are the ex-dividend companies for the month, as above apologies for any that should not be here or which are missing:



Hope this is helpful. All information sourced from DividendData.co.uk

Terry.

Once again, thank you very much. This is extraordinarily useful, and reminds me how much value Luni added to the board. Thank you again!

MDW1954

It has occurred to me that it would be useful to be able to find previous months of this series of threads easily, for example if someone wants to check after the month has ended that all expected dividends have in fact arrived - or indeed to catch up on such checks further back. So I've added brief posts to the August and September versions linking backwards and forwards between them and forwards from September to here, and here's the backwards link to September's version: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=7181.

Gengulphus

Gengulphus wrote:It has occurred to me that it would be useful to be able to find previous months of this series of threads easily, for example if someone wants to check after the month has ended that all expected dividends have in fact arrived - or indeed to catch up on such checks further back. So I've added brief posts to the August and September versions linking backwards and forwards between them and forwards from September to here, and here's the backwards link to September's version: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=7181.

Gengulphus

Good suggestion. Going forward I will try to remember to link to the prior month, then readers can track back as far as they need.

Of course it does increase the risk that any inconsistency of inclusions will show up

Terry.

Slim pickings next month, only Glaxo for me. I suspect some HYP-like shares have moved their divi payments to other months. Well, luckily I like tomato soup and tuna.

Thanks very much Terry. Very useful, and obviously well received by the team evidenced by the five recs (thanks) you've received thus far.

Regards,

Ian.

Yes, thank you for these.

Might it be an idea to merge the separate months' topics, into one single ongoing topic?

JMN2 wrote:Slim pickings next month, only Glaxo for me. I suspect some HYP-like shares have moved their divi payments to other months. Well, luckily I like tomato soup and tuna.

Yep, from that list only Inmarsat and Petrofac pay out for me in October. On the plus side, September was a handsome month for dividends with what seemed like half the portfolio coughing up cash!

richfool wrote:Yes, thank you for these.

Might it be an idea to merge the separate months' topics, into one single ongoing topic?

And "pin it" perhaps if the forum software allows it.

JMN2 wrote:Slim pickings next month, only Glaxo for me. I suspect some HYP-like shares have moved their divi payments to other months. Well, luckily I like tomato soup and tuna.

Almost as low here, with only Glaxo and Mucklow in October. But I can't complain: this month I've received dividends from 15 out of my HYP's current 39 holdings. With 7 quarterly payers and 32 half-yearly payers (*), the fair "ration" per month is (7*4+32*2)/12 = 7.7, so that was nearly 2 months' worth, and October's couple of payments take it over...

You're right about at least one company moving its payment to another month, by the way - last year I also had two payments in October, but by Glaxo and Taylor Wimpey. The changes this year are that Taylor Wimpey's payment was October 7th last year and is November 3rd this, while Mucklow moved from half-yearly to quarterly payments, bringing parts of its July and January payments forward to April and October.

And in 2015, my HYP contained six October payments. The four that were no longer in October in 2016 were payments by Amlin, HSBC, Pennon and Segro: of those, Amlin's payment genuinely disappeared completely, through being taken over - though of course I replaced the income by reinvesting the takeover proceeds! The other three moved back into September - only 'day of week drift' from the start of October to the end of September for HSBC and Segro, but Pennon brought its payment forward a whole month, from the start of October to the start of September.

The point of all that is that these things do vary quite a bit from year to year, so the idea that some have mentioned in the past of trying to equalise one's monthly dividend income across the year by using dividend payment dates as a share selection criterion is likely to cause one to avoid good shares in favour of less good ones, for a 'benefit' that's quite likely to be steadily eroded away by such events. And if one persists in trying to keep the monthly income balanced, one is likely to have to pay that price of selecting less good shares than one could each time one has takeover proceeds to reinvest. And to face the choice of letting the income grow unbalanced anyway as income happens to move into different months than planned, or tinkering to rebalance it and paying the same price when one has tinkering proceeds to reinvest...

An 'income buffering account' is really a much simpler and more practical way of dealing with the issue if one is concerned about it! (Not saying or implying that you are concerned about it, by the way - it's just that I know that some are from past discussions on TMF, and I think here as well.)

(*) Counting current non-payers according to how frequently they've most recently been paying.

Gengulphus

Thanks Wizard

I have five for this month, four of which are fairly obvious HYP shares I would have thought. Glaxo, Chesnara, Phoenix and Admiral. Still, compared to September's bonanza it is a bit thin. Picking up Gengulphus's comments, I would never select a share on the basis of its dividend payment dates

Dod

Dod1010 wrote:Thanks Wizard

I have five for this month, four of which are fairly obvious HYP shares I would have thought. Glaxo, Chesnara, Phoenix and Admiral. Still, compared to September's bonanza it is a bit thin. Picking up Gengulphus's comments, I would never select a share on the basis of its dividend payment dates

Dod

I have 8 this month, 7 of which are (or were!) HYP shares and 1 IT.

Of the 8, 2 payments have been moved from September last year and 1 from November.

Trying to equalise one's monthly dividend income seems futile to me. Companies change their payment dates, change their financial years, move to quarterly payments, cut their dividends.........

I was looking at my dividend payment charts going back to 2009 last night, and October is the worst month for me. Best months are June/Sept/March
Not that it matters of course... if I ever get round to drawing an income rather than reinvesting divis I'll run with a 'buffer' to smooth things out

Dod1010 wrote:I have five for this month, four of which are fairly obvious HYP shares I would have thought. Glaxo, Chesnara, Phoenix and Admiral. ...

Glaxo, yes, and quite possibly Chesnara, Phoenix and Admiral are fairly obvious HYP shares now. But those of us whose HYPs have been going for many years are quite liable to have got our insurance companies back when none of them really qualified and to be happy with them. In my case, for example, I first bought both Aviva and Legal & General back in 2003, at which time Admiral hadn't yet paid any dividends at all, and Chesnara and Phoenix didn't even exist! (Chesnara was formed in 2004 and Phoenix in 2008.)

I've generally been very happy with Legal & General - it did cut its dividend by 50% in the financial crisis of 2008/9, but that's par for the course for financial companies in that period and it recovered quickly, getting back to over the 2007 total in 2011 and more than doubling it since then. Aviva is much less satisfactory, but has escaped the tinkering axe by the skin of its teeth - I do remember considering Admiral as a replacement for it around 2012, but being put off by not really feeling able to assess Admiral's peculiar dividend policy (should one count the 'not-so-special' dividends when calculating the yield, in which case it had a very high yield but flawed by very low dividend cover, or not, in which case it had excellent dividend cover but only an averagish yield?). By the way, note that I'm not saying that there was an actual problem with the company - it's pretty clear by now that there wasn't! - but there was one with my ability to assess it, and I generally steer clear of companies I feel insufficiently able to assess...

The result has been that the insurance sector has been highly weighted in my HYP for many years now, and so I'm not looking for more insurance companies to add to it. Indeed, having just had Aberdeen Asset Management merged into Standard Life to form Standard Life Aberdeen, boosting the amount of insurance in my HYP, the sector is now rather more heavily weighted than I really want. Not enough to make me top-slice it yet, but I'm definitely a lot closer to selling some of its insurance holdings than to buying more!

By the way, just to be clear, this is only meant as an explanation of how my HYP got into its current state of lacking all three of Admiral, Chesnara and Phoenix, in case you or anyone else is interested. Not as a defence of the actions that led to it - I freely acknowledge that I've made some mistakes along the way, some of which were probably visible at the time, i.e. without hindsight.

Gengulphus

Thank you - most helpful

A few weeks back, I wrote in this thread:

Almost as low here, with only Glaxo and Mucklow in October.

I should correct this - I have actually had three October HYP dividends. The extra one is Standard Life Aberdeen, which I think I failed to spot in the list because I basically still think of it as "Aberdeen" rather than "Standard Life"...

Gengulphus

I also hold Legal & General so in one sense I am a rather overweight with insurers since I also hold as already commented, Chesnara, Phoenix and Admiral. I would have been very happy to have continued to hold Amlin as well but of course our Japanese friends were even happier and what is more they liked it so much they bought the whole company.

Insurance as a sector contains many different beasts and in any case I do not worry about sector spread. I am much more into companies from the ground up than seeking any great spread of sectors. See where that got some on the thread about Interserve I think it was.

Even the two zombies, Chesnara and Pheonix are not entirely the same, because Chesnara throws in a couple of 'live' companies. Legal and General is of course a life insurer a bit like Standard Life Aberdeen, but both are very significant fund managers as well. Admiral is primarily a UK motor insurer, although now trying to branch out overseas and in the UK as a household insurer. So I have no qualms about holding my four insurers and they seem to me to be very obvious candidates for any HYP.

Dod

Dod101 wrote: Legal and General is of course a life insurer a bit like Standard Life Aberdeen, but both are very significant fund managers as well.
Dod

I sometimes wonder whether these companies aren't better regarded as fund managers, with a sideline in insurance

77ss

I agree. They have both been 'derisking' their businesses for years (and risk is the essence of insurance) I suppose that fundamentally it is the big continental reinsurers like Munichre, Swissre and Allianz that are the risk carriers nowadays and even they are also big fund managers as they need that skill to manage their reserve assets.

Dod