The wheat is getting separated from the chaff. While big names were cutting dividends to manage their debt, there are slew of mid to small cap companies that are continuing to show resilience, and continuing to show how to manage sustainable and profitable business even in recession. Many companies are continuing to make sure shareholders have a stake in the business by increasing dividends. Among these dividend growers, following are three companies that have received by attention for the dividend increase.
Lincoln Electric Holdings Inc. (LECO): LECO manufactures and sells welding and cutting products worldwide. The products are mostly sold to industrial customers in general metal fabrication, power generation and process industry, structural steel construction, heavy equipment fabrication, shipbuilding, automotive, pipe mills and pipelines, and offshore oil and gas exploration and extraction markets. The company was founded in 1895 and has headquarters in Cleveland, Ohio. It is part of S&P 400 MidCap index.
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Brown & Brown, Inc. (BRO) and its subsidiaries, provides insurance and reinsurance products and services, as well as risk management, employee benefit administration and managed health care services. It is a diversified insurance agency and brokerage firm, markets and sells to its customer’s insurance products and services, primarily in the property and casualty area. BRO has operations in 219 locations and in 37 states.
It is close of five year now that I have been a long term buy and hold, and dividend growth focused investor. When I meet friends, acquaintances, or colleagues, on many occasions the discussion starts from what’s market doing today and steers towards trading/investing is nothing but a poker game. I get a sense that many of these folks think that buying (and selling) stocks is just a gamble of some kind. Irrespective of this, I believe both, trading and investing, have their own set of pros and cons depending upon what context an individual is looking at it. In the end, both trading and investing is done to make money. Some use approach of capital appreciation, some use dividend income, some do trades to generate income. The key is to have a plan and execute it with consistent results.
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