Paying Attention To Dividends More Important Than Ever

Standard & Poor's has released dividend data for the S&P 500 Index through the month of February. Any dividend investor knows cuts have been coming at a fast and furious pace.

Do in part to the dividend cuts by high profile companies like General Electric (GE), Dow Chemical (DOW) and Macy's (M), just to name a few, companies seem more willing to cut the company dividend at this time in order to preserve cash.

• Negative dividend actions total 23 in February versus just 2 in February of 2008.

• Year to date there have been 34 negative dividend actions versus 9 in the first two months of February last year.

• Not all the cuts are from the financial sector. In January 80% of the cuts were financials; however, in February less than 50% of the cuts were financial firms.
  

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An an average return basis, the dividend paying stocks in the S&P 500 Index lost a great deal of ground to the non-payers. The payer's average return in February totaled -20.42% versus -12.52 for the non-payers.

A detailed listing of the dividend actions in outlined in the dividend action spreadsheet below.

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Data Source: Standard & Poor's