Okay, you know what a dividend is. Companies generally commit to paying it when they have soooo much extra cash profit that they really don’t know what to do with the dough.
Yeah, nice place to be.
In the case of preferred stock, the dividends aren’t just…optional-ish. They operate more like bond interest. only with a catch. Dividends on preferred stock can, in fact, be halted without the company being repossessed by the debt holders. Like...in the case where the company falls on hard times. Or it wants to preserve its cash to buy a competitor. Or it just wants another jet-with-waterslide-thing.
So there are two types of preferred stock in this realm...the ones that pay cumulate dividends, and ones that don’t… cleverly named non-cumulative. Say a company has halted dividends from its preferred for 3 ½ years… and it was paying five dollars a quarter in dividends from those cumulative preferreds. Well, if it was to resume paying dividends on them, it would first have to pay all 14 quarters’ worth of dividends before it began to issue more dividends. That is, it owed 3 years times 4 quarters, or 12 quarters, plus a half year, or 2 quarters, for a total of 14, at 5 bucks a quarter a share. That's 5 times 14, or 70 bucks. Big obligation. But it has to pay that amount before it can resume dividend payments.
Why would a company have a cumulative feature in its preferred dividend obligation? Because investors forced it to do so, worried that the preferred dividends might be just summarily stopped, and then the investors would have little or no return on their investment in the preferreds. And this can be a problem for companies that have fallen on hard times. They are essentially made illiquid, in that they can’t afford to pay the back dividends on the preferreds, and they can’t raise more capital with this blight on their record of having stopped paying a divvy. Most preferred stocks are non-cumulative, and if companies decide to just stop paying them, they can…but if they do, it’s like they have kind of reneged on a handshake. And, uh…investors…talk.
So like…good luck to the company ever trying to raise capital again from the cold, cruel outside world.
Related or Semi-related Video
Finance: What is Dividend Yield?4 Views
finance a la shmoop what is dividend yield? ah dividends the sign of the truly
well-to-do company well when a company has nothing better to do with its cash
and it has bought all of the corporate jets it wanted put in fountains in the [Fountain of water appears]
executive suite bathrooms and offered massage and dog therapy to all of its
employees it can then at its own discretion pay a dividend to its common
shareholders of record common shareholders yep that's who gets
dividends if you're an employee at a company and got say a bunch of stock [Employee stood beside company]
options when the company signed you you don't get dividends unless you buy out
your stock options and turn them into actual shares or common stock yeah well
dividends get paid quarterly in almost all companies in the US and companies
typically "declare" what their dividend will be a year or two or
three in advance if they can Wall Street does not like surprises so Daddy [Wall Street appears]
Warbucks rifles has made Bank in this neo zombie apocalypse and after buying
all of the anti zombie spray it ever wanted along with the jets and fountain
and doggy meditation classes well the company has extra cash it plans to [Dividends by a company building]
dividend out that cash on a regular basis and just like most companies
it has forecasted earnings three or four years or more into the future and this
dividend payout will be some relatively modest percentage of earnings like if
earnings will be something like 50 million then 70 million then 90 million
x3 years while the dividend might be declared as 25 million dollars a year [Dividend payments appear]
while doing the math here that'd be a 50% of earnings payout ratio in year one
but if they keep the dividend flat and don't raise it well it would just be
then twenty five over seventy or thirty six percent payout in year two and if
they still keep it flat in your three well it would just be a 25 over 90 there
that's a 28 percent payout and in real life odds are good they'd raised their
dividend if their earnings performance was you know this good [Thumbs up appears]
good performance right so what then is the dividend yield here to investors who
own a share of common stock well if the stock was trading for 40 bucks a share
and the dividend was 60 cents than the dividend yield would be 60 over 4000 or
0.6 60 cents there over the 40 bucks or 1.5 percent if the stock ran up to 60
bucks a share and the yield remained 60 cents well than the yield would be one
percent right 60 over 6,000 there yeah and if the stock tanked to be just 10 [Stock plot line crashes]
bucks a share and the dividend was still 60 cents a share the yielded be 6
percent so you can imagine how high dividend yields kind of cushion the
downside of stock like getting 6% it's pretty safe you know people are gonna be
happy to just collect your divvy right all right well that's yield a la
dividend and what should you do with the few bucks you'll make each month from [Man discussing dividends]
your dividends well you might want to stock up on that zombie spray in case
that things go awry [Person spraying zombie with anti zombie spray]
Up Next
What is an Accumulated Dividend? Accumulated dividends are dividends paid on cumulative preferred stock. They are referred to as accumulated becaus...
What is the Dividend Discount Model? Valuation of stocks can take numerous forms. One way in which one perspective on undervalued stocks is determi...
What is Dividend Coverage/the Dividend Payout Ratio? The Dividend Cover ratio is the factor by which a company can overpay its dividend when its ne...
What are Dividends: Declaration date, Dated date, Pay date, Effective date, Ex-distribution date, Ex-Date, and Reset date? Dividends are sums of mo...