19 Dividend Increases: October 15-19, 2018 (Part 1: Energy, Industrials, and Materials)

Companies that regularly increase their dividends show confidence in the potential growth of future earnings. Monitoring dividend increases for stocks on my watch is one way I identify candidates for further analysis.

This week, 19 companies decided to increase their dividends, including 2 of the stocks I own.

Part 1 covers stocks in the Energy, Industrials, and Materials sectors. Part 2 will cover the remaining sectors.

Of the 8 stocks I'm covering in Part 1, the top increase is 21%!

The top increase is from Lincoln Electric Holdings (LECO), a company that designs, develops, manufactures, and sells arc-welding products, robotic arc welding systems, plasma, and oxy-fuel cutting equipment. LECO announced an impressive increase of 21% and now yields 2.27% at $82.76 per share.

Two stocks share second place with increases of 9% each. To see details of these increases, please read this article at Seeking Alpha.

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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Please feel free to leave comments on this article either at Seeking Alpha or here, on my blog. I'll do my best to respond to each comment as quickly as possible.