October 2024 proved to be a net negative month for the dividend paying firms of the U.S. stock market.
Although we've seen the positive development of eleven fewer firms announcing they will either cut or suspend their dividends when compared with the same month a year earlier, this improvement in unfavorable dividend actions has coincided with the negative development of 29 fewer firms declaring they will increase their dividends.
That's the difference that leads us to describe October 2024 as a negative month for dividend paying firms. The single number that describes the month is -18, which is based on 11 fewer firms announcing dividend decreases paired with 29 fewer firms declaring they will increase their cash dividend payouts.
All the month's favorable and unfavorable changes are tallied up in the following table.
| Dividend Changes in October 2024 | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct-2024 | Sep-2024 | MoM | Oct-2023 | YoY | |
| Total Declarations | 3,806 | 4,603 | -797 ▼ | 3,512 | 294 ▲ |
| Favorable | 175 | 136 | 39 ▲ | 204 | -29 ▼ |
| - Increases | 135 | 89 | 46 ▲ | 137 | -2 ▼ |
| - Special/Extra | 40 | 47 | -7 ▼ | 67 | -27 ▼ |
| - Resumed | 0 | 0 | 0 ◀▶ | 0 | 0 ◀▶ |
| Unfavorable | 7 | 9 | -2 ▼ | 18 | -11 ▼ |
| - Decreases | 7 | 9 | -2 ▼ | 18 | -11 ▼ |
| - Omitted/Passed | 0 | 0 | 0 ◀▶ | 0 | 0 ◀▶ |
The following chart visualizes the monthly counts of dividend increases and decreases from January 2004 through October 2024.
With two of the past three months having had a negative number for the net year-over-year change of favorable and unfavorable dividend actions, it looks like we can finally answer the question we asked after reviewing July 2024's dividend numbers of how long the positive trend we noted at that time would last. That trend no longer exists.
References
Standard and Poor. S&P Market Attributes Web File. [Excel Spreadsheet]. Accessed 1 November 2024.
Image credit: Dividends by Nick Youngson on PicPedia. Creative Commons Creative Commons 3 - CC BY-SA 3.0.