Companies pay investors record amounts in dividends this year

YORK – It pays more than ever to be an investor. U.S. companies have sent a record amount of cash to their shareholders as dividends this year as their profits continue to pile higher.

The increase is key for shareholders, offering a bit of stability in what’s been a stomach-churning year for the stock market. The S&P 500 index has twice plunged by 10 percent.

Wall Street is forecasting the choppiness to continue in 2019, partly because of slower growth in economies and corporate profits around the world. So any cushion for investors would be a welcome one. Three years ago, for example, dividends were the sole reason investors got anything out of their S&P 500 index funds. The index dropped 0.7 percent that year, but with dividends its total return was 1.4 percent.

With less than a month left in 2018, companies in the S&P 500 index have already topped last year’s record of $419.8 billion in total dividends paid, according to Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at S&P Dow Jones Indices. Tyson Foods, Anadarko Petroleum and D.R. Horton all announced dividend hikes of at least 20 percent last month. The biggest payer in the S&P 500 is AT&T, and Silverblatt says it may announce a boost to its payout in coming weeks to make it 34 consecutive years of increases.

Companies have the wherewithal to do all this because their profits continue to surge. Across the S&P 500, earnings per share jumped nearly 26 percent during the summer from a year earlier for the strongest growth in eight years.

Besides dividends, companies have also been setting aside more of their profits for repurchases of their own stock as methods to return cash to shareholders.