We've already made some observations about "earnings season".  How about dividend season?  When do the bulk of companies issue dividends?

Here, there are complications relating to the fact that many sorts of publicly traded issues have dividends...publicly traded funds, different classes of preferred stock, etc.  For our study, we only examined common stock trading in the US.  Bulletin board and pink sheet stocks were excluded.  We examined dividends from the beginning of Jan 2004 to the end of March 2004...the first quarter.  Presumably, whatever patterns we find can hold up reasonably well across the other three quarters.

For every time a company issues a dividend, there are a couple of times where the stock could be affected.  The first time is the "ex-dividend date".  If you don't own the stock by the ex-dividend date, you can't get the dividend.  Then there's the record date...this is the date the company opens the shareholder records to see who is eligible for the dividend.  Normally, the dividend payment date is about 3 weeks after the ex date.

We looked at 918 stocks over the period.  The first half of January saw 101 companies going ex-dividend and the second half 89.  The first half of February had 186 companies reporting, the second half 181.  The first half of March saw 268 companies go ex-dividend, while the second half had 93.

The most frequent ex-dividend date was 3/11, followed by 2/11, 2/26, 2/25, 3/3, and 3/10.  As with earnings, the beginnings and ends of quarters are rather quiet.  In the case of 3/11, the bulk of the payment dates are either 3/31 or 4/1.  The payment dates for the 2/11 stocks were more spread around, but March 1 was the single most common payment date.  Most of the 2/26 stocks had payment dates around 3/15, though a surprising number wait all the way to April 1 to make the payment.

How about industries?  Below, we show the number (not percentage) of companies reporting at various times.

Unlike earnings, dividends seem more evenly distributed across industries.  The only number that grabs us is the number of banks "going ex" in the first half of March.

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