3 Days Left To GAIN Capital Holdings Inc (NYSE:GCAP)’s Ex-Dividend Date, Should You Buy?
If you are interested in cashing in on GAIN Capital Holdings Inc’s (NYSE:GCAP) upcoming dividend of $0.06 per share, you only have 3 days left to buy the shares before its ex-dividend date, 26 March 2018, in time for dividends payable on the 30 March 2018. Investors looking for higher income-generating stocks to add to their portfolio should keep reading, as I examine GAIN Capital Holdings’s latest financial data to analyse its dividend characteristics. Check out our latest analysis for GAIN Capital Holdings
5 checks you should use to assess a dividend stock
Whenever I am looking at a potential dividend stock investment, I always check these five metrics:
Does it pay an annual yield higher than 75% of dividend payers?
Has it consistently paid a stable dividend without missing a payment or drastically cutting payout?
Has dividend per share amount increased over the past?
Does earnings amply cover its dividend payments?
Will it be able to continue to payout at the current rate in the future?
How does GAIN Capital Holdings fare?
The current payout ratio for GCAP is negative, which means that it is loss-making, and paying its dividend from its retained earnings. If dividend is a key criteria in your investment consideration, then you need to make sure the dividend stock you’re eyeing out is reliable in its payments. Unfortunately, it is really too early to view GAIN Capital Holdings as a dividend investment. It has only been consistently paying dividends for 6 years, however, standard practice for reliable payers is to look for a 10-year minimum track record. Compared to its peers, GAIN Capital Holdings generates a yield of 3.32%, which is high for Capital Markets stocks but still below the market’s top dividend payers.
Next Steps:
Now you know to keep in mind the reason why investors should be careful investing in GAIN Capital Holdings for the dividend. On the other hand, if you are not strictly just a dividend investor, the stock could still be offering some interesting investment opportunities. Given that this is purely a dividend analysis, I urge potential investors to try and get a good understanding of the underlying business and its fundamentals before deciding on an investment. There are three essential factors you should further examine:
Future Outlook: What are well-informed industry analysts predicting for GCAP’s future growth? Take a look at our free research report of analyst consensus for GCAP’s outlook.
Historical Performance: What has GCAP’s returns been like over the past? Go into more detail in the past track record analysis and take a look at the free visual representations of our analysis for more clarity.
Dividend Rockstars: Are there better dividend payers with stronger fundamentals out there? Check out our free list of these great stocks here.
To help readers see pass the short term volatility of the financial market, we aim to bring you a long-term focused research analysis purely driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis does not factor in the latest price sensitive company announcements.
The author is an independent contributor and at the time of publication had no position in the stocks mentioned.
