Were you also surprised finding out that the Abbott‘s dividend rate fell to 0.14 a share and started creeping what was going on? Well, today my stock spreadsheet showed up with this dividend rate and yield, see a print screen below.
I knew Abbot was going to split in January 2013, but I didn’t realize that they would announce already split dividend, so I started freaking out, what the heck was happening with our great Abbott company.
Finding some information which would make sense to me wasn’t easy. Everybody was talking a language I didn’t understand. But I found it. Abbott is going to pay a quarterly dividend of $0.14 a share and a new company AbbVie will pay the remaining $0.40 a share dividend. Both companies combined will pay $0.54 a share which is 6% increase of the dividend.
The company will split 1:1 and each shareholder gets 1/2 of Abbot and 1/2 of the new company AbbVie.
I only wonder how they want to split my 19 shares in half…
Happy Trading!
I use to do the same thing. But don’t beat yourself up too bad. ABT is a mammoth dividend payer so for them to cut their stock by over 75% should cause one to panic.
Marvin, when I saw it for the first time I was panicking. Many times I see some price action usually which goes against me and desperately want to know why. Maybe that’s my problem.
I encountered the same problem. I initially thought it was a small dividend they were paying out to avoid new taxes in 2013. But ran into the same thing you did.