22 Dividend Increases: April 16-20, 2018 (Part 1: Energy And Financials Sectors)

I monitor dividend increases for stocks on my watch list of dividend growth stocks to identify candidates for further analysis. Companies that regularly raise their dividends show confidence in the potential growth of future earnings. I look for announcements from stocks in the CCC list, but I use several screens to limit the number of stocks to monitor. For example, I only monitor companies with market caps greater than $500M.

In the past week, 22 companies on my watch list decided to increase their dividends. I own one of these stocks. Part 1 of this article presents dividend increases from stocks in the Energy and Financials sectors. See the upcoming Part 2 for dividend increase announcements from the remaining sectors.

As a bonus, I include a summary of available ex-dividend dates for the next two weeks.

The top increase in the Energy and Financials sectors is from S&T Bancorp (STBA), a bank holding company for S&T Bank founded in 1902 and headquartered in Indiana, Pennsylvania. STBA increase its dividend by about 14%. The stock now yields 2.338% at $41.96 per share.

STBA is the only stock in the Energy and Financials sectors with a double-digit percentage increase. However, several stocks have increased their dividend more than once in the past year. In fact, five stocks have year over year increases of more than 20%! That's very impressive!

To see details of all the dividend increases announced by stocks in the Energy and Financials sectors, please read this article at Seeking Alpha. I include three F.A.S.T. Graphs to illustrate the impressive earnings and dividend growth rates of some of these stocks.

As a bonus, I'm including a summary of ex-dividend dates for the next two weeks. Scan the list of stocks to see if there's a stock you want to pick up before the ex-dividend date so you can grab the next dividend.

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