The DivGro Weekly—05.06.26

219 Consecutive dividend increases

Weekly Dividend Progress

This week we received further real-time, tangible evidence of outstanding business progress when Lowe’s increased its dividend by 4.2%. We also collected our quarterly dividends from MSCI, Visa and Zoetis and became entitled to our quarterly dividends from Interactive Brokers and Home Depot, all meaningfully higher than this time last year.

How We Are Tracking

Since DivGro's inception we have predicted and benefited from 219 consecutive dividend increases across our portfolio companies, with no decreases. The average rate of these dividend increases is 13.9%.

MSCI

Esteemed compiler of global indices, MSCI, recently increased its dividend by 13.9% — bolstering a remarkable record of multiplying its dividend 11-fold since its maiden dividend in 2014. In 2007, MSCI was spun out of Morgan Stanley and has since outperformed its former parent by 10x. Today, MSCI has a stranglehold on global indices — on which it earns toll-like fees from asset managers who seek to replicate its indices, and increasingly develop customised indices using MSCI’s tools. The growth of these asset managers increases MSCI’s fees as well; the longer their funds exist, the more they become tethered to MSCI. While some of MSCI’s adjacent analytics businesses, including its nascent but booming private equity analytics partnership with Moody’s (another DivGro holding), have recently been perceived as possible AI targets, MSCI rejects these claims given the key data utilised is both inaccessible and highly confidential. Rather, AI has boosted MSCI’s ability to broaden its product suite leveraging this proprietary data — a view the marketplace has now begun to rally behind. With a stream of toll-like fees and fast-growing analytics adjacencies, MSCI appears set to build upon its impressive dividend growth record in the future.