Vail Resorts Inc (NYSE:MTN): Dividend Is Coming In 3 Days, Should You Buy?
Attention dividend hunters! Vail Resorts Inc (NYSE:MTN) will be distributing its dividend of $1.47 per share on the 11 April 2018, and will start trading ex-dividend in 3 days time on the 26 March 2018. Is this future income stream a compelling catalyst for dividend investors to think about the stock as an investment today? Let’s take a look at Vail Resorts’s most recent financial data to examine its dividend characteristics in more detail. See our latest analysis for Vail Resorts
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?
Does it consistently pay out dividends without missing a payment of significantly cutting payout?
Has it increased its dividend per share amount over the past?
Is it able to pay the current rate of dividends from its earnings?
Based on future earnings growth, will it be able to continue to payout dividend at the current rate?
How does Vail Resorts fare?
The current trailing twelve-month payout ratio for the stock is 56.18%, meaning the dividend is sufficiently covered by earnings. In the near future, analysts are predicting a higher payout ratio of 80.01%, leading to a dividend yield of around 2.49%. In addition to this, EPS should increase to $8.32. The higher payout forecasted, along with higher earnings, should lead to greater dividend income for investors moving forward. If there’s one type of stock you want to be reliable, it’s dividend stocks and their stable income-generating ability. The reality is that it is too early to consider Vail Resorts as a dividend investment. It has only been consistently paying dividends for 7 years, however, standard practice for reliable payers is to look for a 10-year minimum track record. In terms of its peers, Vail Resorts has a yield of 2.56%, which is high for Hospitality stocks but still below the market’s top dividend payers.
Next Steps:
If you are building an income portfolio, then Vail Resorts is a complicated choice since it has some positive aspects as well as negative ones. However, if you are not strictly just a dividend investor, the stock could still offer some interesting investment opportunities. Given that this is purely a dividend analysis, I recommend taking sufficient time to understand its core business and determine whether the company and its investment properties suit your overall goals. I’ve put together three important factors you should further research:
Future Outlook: What are well-informed industry analysts predicting for MTN’s future growth? Take a look at our free research report of analyst consensus for MTN’s outlook.
Valuation: What is MTN 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 MTN is currently mispriced by the market.
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.
