Is there an easy way to look up dividend history of companies that used to be income trusts? I use google finance, but for many Canadian companies it only goes back to about 2010 and then I have to go to the Investor section of the company's website, some of which have the info in a nice readable format and some don't. Are there any stock screeners that pull in this info?
Go to Yahoo.ca in the Finance section.Originally Posted by Loon
Plug in the current stock symbol for the former trust (ex. PGF.TO).
When the summary quote comes up, pick "Historical Prices" on the left column.
Select "Dividends Only" plus the date range.
The last trust payment was Jan 17th, 2011 but list of payments back to 2006 in my test.
Once the desired date range and data mix (share price plus dividends can also be selected), scroll down to the bottom to click on the "download to spreadsheet", to get the data into Excel format on your computer.
I don't know for how many stocks this works but I've retrieved payments from prior to the conversion from trust for both PGF.TO and ARX.TO
Cheers
P.S.
Just keep in mind that both trust payments and eligible dividends are going to be listed, with nothing to indicate when the change happened.
Last edited by Eclectic12; 2012-05-23 at 03:44 PM. Reason: added PS
Thanks Eclectic, I just tried it on several stocks and it works good.
Normally I would be wary of drops in dividends but it appears to have been normal for the dividend to drop after the conversion from income trust to corporation. Is there a reason for that? Here are some examples.
From 2010 to 2011
NWC dropped 1.36 to 0.96
SCU dropped 0.85 to 0.60
RSI dropped 0.46 to 0.34
LIQ dropped 1.62 to 1.08
GH stayed the same at 0.88
When looking for dividend growth as a screening factor for stocks, how much drop should an investor find acceptable to attribute to the conversion?
A lot of the Income trusts dropped their pay outs, but not their "in pocket" distributions. Income trusts weren't true dividends and were taxed higher than true dividends in most cases. The "after conversion" rates usually reflected the new tax benefits of being true dividends. Of course, it depends what your tax bracket was before but, in general, this is why they dropped. The amount in your pocket for the "average" tax payer shouldn't have changed much for the unit holders.
It should also be noted that not all trusts converted in this manner...would probably be worth digging up the press announcement where they explained their conversion.
I'm not JustAGuy (without spaces).
In theory, shouldn't the "distribution" cut of a given trust be equal to its corporate tax rate?
Assuming, they weren't doing any financial engineering during the trust days.
Also, the switch from GAAP to IFRS was poor timing for many unit trusts that converted, making it harder to decipher their true net income and true payout ratios.
Also, most companies will have all of the info you are looking for on their websites.
Hmmm ... the tax rates paid by the tax payer will vary but for the trust itself, it used to pay lower taxes than a regular corporation. The idea of the trust is to have most of the taxes paid by the tax payer who owns the investment. The regular corporation that pays eligible dividends has the dividend tax credit to make up for the fact that the corporation has already paid taxes at a higher rate.
If the trusts were paying higher taxes themselves, the gov't would have happily accepted the extra tax money and left the status quo in place. Also - dividend paying companies such as BCE would not have planned to convert to a trust as they'd have to pay higher taxes, making it more difficult to fund the distributions that typically were higher than dividends.
http://www.bdo.ca/library/publicatio...s/2006-04l.cfm
Instead, my understanding is that the gov't added taxes so that a non-qualifying trust pays pretty much the same tax rate internally as a regular corporation does.
Some non-qualifying trusts cut their distributions so that the trust unit price hit would all be at the same time as the drop when the gov't announced the changes. Others reduced their distribution in 2011 by the amount of the increased tax and posted a notice indicating that the change was tax based, not a cut in payments. Others converted to a corporation to avoid the tax on non-qualifying trusts and delayed planned distribution increases.
Qualifying trusts such as Rio-Can continue to pay a reduced tax rate like all trusts did in 2005.
The last I dug into it, something like 95% of the non-qualifying trusts planned to convert to a corporation by Jan 2011. I seem to recall about five stating "after analysis, the cost to convert does not make it worth converting". Another five or so said they planned on using up their accumulated tax pools and would convert to a corporation at a future date (2012 and 2013 were the projected timing).
HaroldCrump:
Bear in mind that a tax related distribution cut for a trust only applies to the few trusts that don't qualify and decided to remain a trust. For that limited number, then yes - the drop in payout should match the increase in their corporate tax rate.
As an example, Boston Pizza Royalties Income Fund (BPF-UN.to) paid $0.115 per unit for all of 2010 and $0.084 for months in 2012, until their next distribution hike to $0.092 in Aug 2011. If the distributions are tracked back to 2005, the Jan 2011 drop is the only drop in distributions recorded.
Cheers
Last edited by Eclectic12; 2012-06-22 at 12:22 PM. Reason: spelling
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