Is Buying Southwest Georgia Financial Corporation (NYSEMKT:SGB) For Its Upcoming $0.12 Dividend A Good Choice?

Attention dividend hunters! Southwest Georgia Financial Corporation (AMEX:SGB) will be distributing its dividend of $0.12 per share on the 15 June 2018, and will start trading ex-dividend in 3 days time on the 04 June 2018. What does this mean for current shareholders and potential investors? Below, I will explain how holding Southwest Georgia Financial can impact your portfolio income stream, by analysing the stock’s most recent financial data and dividend attributes. Check out our latest analysis for Southwest Georgia Financial

5 questions I ask before picking a dividend stock

Whenever I am looking at a potential dividend stock investment, I always check these five metrics:

• Is its annual yield among the top 25% of dividend-paying companies?

• Has it paid dividend every year without dramatically reducing payout in the past?

• Has it increased its dividend per share amount over the past?

• Is is able to pay the current rate of dividends from its earnings?

• Will the company be able to keep paying dividend based on the future earnings growth?

AMEX:SGB Historical Dividend Yield May 31st 18

How well does Southwest Georgia Financial fit our criteria?

The current trailing twelve-month payout ratio for the stock is 28.19%, meaning the dividend is sufficiently covered by earnings. Furthermore, analysts have not forecasted a dividends per share for the future, which makes it hard to determine the yield shareholders should expect, and whether the current payout is sustainable, moving forward. If there is one thing that you want to be reliable in your life, it’s dividend stocks and their constant income stream. Not only have dividend payouts from Southwest Georgia Financial fallen over the past 10 years, it has also been highly volatile during this time, with drops of over 25% in some years. This means that dividend hunters should probably steer clear of the stock, at least for now until the track record improves. Compared to its peers, Southwest Georgia Financial produces a yield of 2.23%, which is on the low-side for Banks stocks.

Next Steps:

After digging a little deeper into Southwest Georgia Financial’s yield, it’s easy to see why you should be cautious investing in the company just 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 relevant aspects you should further examine:

1. Valuation: What is SGB worth today? Even if the stock is a cash cow, it’s not worth an infinite price. The intrinsic value infographic in our free research report helps visualize whether SGB is currently mispriced by the market.

2. Management Team: An experienced management team on the helm increases our confidence in the business – take a look at who sits on Southwest Georgia Financial’s board and the CEO’s back ground.

3. 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.