Making America Great! US Corporations Raising Dividends -- May 21, 2019

See this note from May 16, 2019, for background.

Dividends, through the month of May only, selected examples:

• Cardinal Health: ups dividend, from 47.63 cents to 48.11 cents/share.
• Tractor Supply: huge dividend increase, from 31 cents to 35 cents/share.

Who says shale companies aren't making money? FANG ups dividend from 12.5 cents/share to 18.75 cents/share. Wow.

• Phillips 66: huge dividend increase. From 80 cents/share to 90 cents/share. Wow. Is that a 12.5% increase in its dividend.
• Oasis Midstream Partners: from 45 cents/share to 47 cents/share.

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment, financial, job, travel, or relationship decisions based on what you read here or think you may have read here.

• Baxter: from 19 cents to 22 cents/share.
• Look at this, CAT: from 86 cents/share to $1.03/share.
• EOG: from 22 cents to 28.75 cents/share.
• AAPL: from 73 cents/share to 77 cents/share.
• XLNX: from 36 cents to 37 cents/share (announced at the end of April). 
• XOM: from 82 cents to 85 cents/share (announced at the end of April).

Comment: for young investors, I would never recommend investing in individual equities. There are much better ways of investing. However, having said that, it has been incredibly rewarding to invest for the long term. It is amazing to the degree that dividends can grow after forty years. My hunch is that millennials could see dividend income exceed their social security income forty years from now.

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The Book Page

He has a sequel (and a little cottage industry) -- In The Hurricane's Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown, Nathaniel Philbrick, c. 2018. This book begins where Valiant Ambition, c. 2016, left off.

I hate to say this but after reading the biography of Alexander the Great, and the biography of George Washington as a military officer, there's no comparison between the two.

By the spring of 1778, when France entered the war on the side of the patriots, the Revolutionary War had evolved into a stalemate. The rebels' land army could not defeat the Tory's navy. From the preface, page xiii:

All that changed in December, 1780, when [British General and CinC] Sir Henry Clinton sent his newest brigadier general, the traitor Benedict Arnold, to Virginia. Having already dispatched the Rhode Islander Nathaniel Greene to do battle with Cornwallis in the Carolinas, Washington sent the young French nobleman whom he regarded as a surrogate son, the Marquis de Lafayette in pursuit of Arnold.

Thus began the movement of troops that resulted nine months later in Cornwallis's entrapment at the shoreside hamlet of Yorktown, when a large fleet of French warships arrived from the Caribbean. As Washington had long since learned, coordinating his army's movements with those of a fleet of sail-powered men-of-war based two thousand miles away was virtually impossible. But in the late summer of 1781, the impossible happened.

And, then, just a few days later, a fleet of British warships appeared.

And the game is afoot.

From the same page:

The Battle of the Chesapeake has been called the most important naval engagement in the history of the world. Fought outside the entrance of the bay between French admiral Comte de Grasse's twenty-four ships of the line and a slightly smaller British fleet commanded by Rear Admiral Thomas Graves, the battle inflicted severe enough damage on the Empire's ships that Graves returned to New York for repairs. 

By preventing the rescue of seven thousand British and German soldiers under the command of General Cornwallis, de Grasse's victory on September 5, 1781, made Washington's subsequent triump at Yorktown a virtual fait accompli.

Peace would not be officially declared for another two years, but that does not change the fact that a naval battle fought between the French and the British was largely responsible for the independences of the United States.

There's a backstory to this but we will talk about that later.