I have a dividend screen that requires all stocks on the list to pay a dividend. I see that SDRL is still showing up even though it eliminated its dividend about a week ago. Any idea when this will show up in the database as not paying a dividend? and generally, how long this type of thing will take to show up.
Thanks!
Good question.
From past experience it could be fast or take a while, unless we report it. We’ll refrain from reporting it to see what happens and learn something useful.
In the meantime, if you are looking for dividend stocks, it’s probably a good thing to add “Yield < 10” to screen out obvious data problems.
Looks like they updated the indicated annual dividend IAD to 0 on 12/2/14, so it took a little over a week in this case
Thanks Marco. I do see that SDRL has been removed from my list. Also, I have tried limiting the yield in the screen I am running, but in all cases it is reducing the annual return by about 4%. I am going to look at the specific trades to see why this is occurring. I fear I am getting into a data mining issue by tweaking the screen too much.
Hi Marco,
I looked at the “Yield < 10” rule and in my screen it had an effect in 6 of the 16 yrs of the screen, and had a large affect in only two years. In 2008/2009 it eliminated a stock during the downturn whose yield shot up to over 30% as a result of its share price falling. That stock (TCK - Teck Resources) rallied over 700% when the market recovered. Missing this one stock cause the return for the year to be lower by >30%. The rule also had a negative affect in 5 of the 6 years where there was an impact and the 1 positive affect was only 3.3%. Are there other data issues I should be considering in not using a rule like “Yield < 10”?
Thanks!
You could try
Yield < 15 AND DivPSdays(360,0,#regular,#exdate,true)>=2
The idea here is to allow for higher Yields (good during market crashes), but tighten it up by only allowing stocks that have paid at least 2 regular dividends in the past 360 days. There might be more issues with stocks that only pay once a year
NOTE: the last ‘true’ parameter makes DivPSDays count the dividends rather than summing them
NOTE2: I had <2 corrected it to >=2
I will see how that rule works. It only seems logical that not having a high dividend cut-off would be detrimental most of the time, as in the SDRL case (it is down ~60% this year and its yield was through the roof - until it was cut to $0). It may be that the other parameters of my screen are generally weeding out these high dividend payers.