Topic: How To Invest

Dividend Advisor Hotline – Friday, September 4, 2020

Article Excerpt

TORONTO-DOMINION BANK, $63.42, Toronto symbol TD, is a buy. TD announces dividend increases annually instead of two or more times per year. With the April 2020 payment, it increased the quarterly dividend by 6.8%, to $0.79 a share from $0.74. The new annual rate of $3.16 yields a high 5.0%. The bank continues to put aside more funds to cover potential bad loans as a result of COVID-19. In its fiscal 2020 third quarter, ended July 31, 2020, those provisions jumped 234.0%, to $2.19 billion from $655 million a year earlier. However, that’s a big improvement over its second-quarter provision of $3.22 billion. Earnings in the latest quarter fell 30.2%, to $1.25 a share (or a total of $2.33 billion) from $1.79 a share (or $3.34 billion). Those figures exclude unusual items such as costs to integrate recent acquisitions. On that basis, the latest earnings beat the consensus estimate of $1.23 a share. Earnings from Canadian retail banking operations (53% of the total) fell 33.2%…