Thursday, 20 December 2012

Investing In Smart Companies

By Elaine Estrada


While it may possibly look that a $10,000 investment in Procter & Gamble dropped to $9,462, the reality is that the addition of dividends would truly indicate that a little profit has been created. If you count the dividends that got paid along the way, a $10,000 investment in Procter & Gamble will have really grown to a few dollars shy of $11,000. Amazing returns? No. But acknowledging dividends is the difference in between relatively losing $500 and booking a $1,000 profit.

Dividends can even have a meaningful impact on firms that cut them, such as Pfizer (PFE). Pfizer cut its quarterly dividend from $0.32 to $0.16, and has been progressively rebuilding the dividend since then, with the last quarterly dividend at $0.22 for each share. Pfizer traded at $23.10 on December 14th, 2007. The company presently trades at $25.18. For five years of capital invested, not a whole lot of action. Based on stock value change only, it would appear that a $10,000 investment only grew to $10,904. But if you include the dividends, you will certainly see that the $10,000 investment increased to $13,812. For a company that cut its dividend at some point along the way, that's quite a considerable difference.

Over a five-year time stretch, these contributions to whole return as a result of the dividends can be quite great. Whilst concentrating on the stock value alone might give the impact that Johnson & Johnson just increased 4-5% in total within the last five years, the inclusion of dividends will show that the result is much more like 24%. Regarding Procter & Gamble, it could possibly be simple to think that traders must have lost cash simply because the stock value today is a couple dollars below what it was five years ago.

And in Pfizer's case, it could become simple to discount the contribution of the dividend altogether because it got cut in half at one point on the way. This is why dividend traders can usually achieve satisfactory or better total returns without religiously concentrating on the total earnings.

Whenever you obtain 2-4% added to the cost of your investment each year, it is simple to discover how you can get a leg up as time passes. The medium-term outcomes for these three companies show the value of dividends to an investor's bottom-line results.




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