Melanie wrote:Gengulphus wrote:I've no idea about the second link, by the way - not a site I've used, and trying it gives me a "Demo Mode" screen. I can apparently get a free account, but I'm not in the habit of providing my details to any website that asks for them and don't plan to acquire such a habit. I've got to have a reasonably good personal reason to want to use the site, and answering a discussion board question isn't enough!
Fair enough. But TBH it's just a site, that offers a paid-for service, but as a teaser offers some figures for free. In limited experience the figures (for divs) are accurate, and seeing as not hold a subscription to any other online research platform, we tend to take whatever we can.
You don't have to enter any details, sign-up, etc. FWIW, I'm just as guarded as the next person re. putting my details out there.
Also fair enough! It wasn't meant at a criticism, by the way, just an explanation that I wasn't commenting on it and why not...
Melanie wrote:This is the *only* reason I embedded that link:
Annual divs in our money, for BHPB
2006 19.7p
2007 23.8p up 20.8%
2008 36.57p up 53.7%
2009 53.88p up 47.3%
2010 57.06p up 5.9%
2011 63.18p up 10.7%
2012 70.28p up 11.2%
2013 75.69p up 7.7%
2014 73.28p down (3.2%)
2015 82.2742p up 12.3%
2016 21.6755p down (73.7%)
2017 64.0437p up 195.5%
OK, given that I can now comment that it isn't entirely accurate. It's reasonably close provided it's taken as a record of the dividends the company paid
for its financial year or the dividends it paid
in a calendar year, but it's not exact, probably because of using different exchange rates to the company. (I can't tell which, as they're the same thing for BLT: its financial year ends on June 30th, so the dividends paid for a financial year will be an interim for the half-year ending the previous December 31st (generally paid in March) and a final (generally paid in September)).
Why I know that it's not completely accurate is that BHP Billiton provide a from-the-horse's-mouth version of the dividends paid in sterling:
https://www.bhp.com/-/media/documents/i ... .pdf?la=enHow I found that is simple: I searched online for "BHP Billiton investor relations". That gave me
https://www.bhp.com/investor-centre, and on looking at that page, it wasn't hard to see a section titled "Dividends" and subtitled "Notice of dividends dates, summary of previous dividends." Clicking on and looking at the resulting page gave me a choice of summaries of previous dividends for the "Limited" company (the Australian part of the "dual listed company" structure) and the "Plc" company (the UK part). I (and presumably you) have shares in the UK "Plc" company, so that's the one I chose.
A similar technique works for many big companies. If you don't immediately find a "Dividends" section, look for a "Shareholder Information" section or similar. If you don't find that either, try searching for "<company name> dividends" instead of "<company name> investor relations" . (Or you could try the searches in the other order - I normally try the investor relations search first, but that's because I'm normally after other stuff as well, such as annual reports.)
I do say just "works for many big companies" rather than something more universal, though, because some companies are unhelpful about that, even a few big ones!
Melanie wrote:so I can't see anything particularly cyclical in the divs, mainly a tendency to increase, excepting a couple of market dramas.
Only one within the range of that table, namely 2016. The 2014 one was just due to exchange rate effects - the dividend was up in US dollars, the declaration currency, but the dollar:sterling exchange rate moved against UK investors more than the increase helped them.
As far as "cyclicality" is concerned, I would drop the idea that "cycles" are involved in any sort of 'scientific' or 'engineering' sense of regularly repeating with a particular period. Instead, I would take it to mean "more than usually sensitive to economic conditions outside the company's control". In BLT's case in 2015-2016, market demand for various commodities dropped significantly (IIRC, attributed to China reducing its growth ambitions), causing commodity prices to drop very sharply and that had a major effect on BLT and other mining companies. It happening was beyond their control - the question was how quickly and effectively they would react to it.
Edit: I'll add that a good rule of thumb is that apparent dividend cuts by less than about 25% are usually revealed on investigation not to be deliberate cuts by the company due to difficulties in maintaining its dividend, but due to a variety of other effects such as exchange rates or rights issue adjustments. Not a certainty, but it can give a good hint what sort of thing to look for first!
Melanie wrote:Geng - do you hold BHP shares in a HYP?
Yes - have done so since 2007. Came close to selling them off in 2015-2016 - it was hard to remain stoically 'non-tinkering' (*) in the face of rarely (if ever!) seeing anyone on TMF with a good word to say about them for many months on end - but I'm glad I didn't! A glance at a 5-year share price chart will reveal why if you don't already know - among doubtless many other places, there's a small one a little way down in
https://uk.advfn.com/p.php?pid=financia ... LT&s_ok=OK. (A free data source that I find useful for an initial quick look at a company, though beware that its data is by no means immune to errors and unconventional interpretations - for instance, all its "debt" and "gearing" figures are based on total liabilities, not those that are actually debt.)
By the way, it's usual to use the stockmarket symbol for a company or its name, making certain not to use an abbreviation of the name that can be mistaken for a stockmarket symbol - which is why I've been calling them "BLT shares". "BHP shares" risks misleading people who aren't aware of the actual situation into using the wrong symbol. It shouldn't do so for those who know what they're doing, even if they don't know the reason for the odd choice of symbol, but that doesn't include everyone! (And if you want to know the reason, BHP Billiton was formed as a dual listed company structure of Australian and UK companies, with the "BHP" coming from "Broken Hill Proprietary" in the original Australian company name and the UK company having been Billiton plc. I presume that each of them simply kept their previous symbol on their main stockmarket in the process - so BHP Billiton Limited has symbol "BHP" on the Australian Stock Exchange, and BHP Billiton plc has symbol "BLT" on the London Stock Exchange.)
Gengulphus