The DivGro Weekly—11.09.26
223 Consecutive dividend increases
Weekly Dividend Progress
This week we received further real-time, tangible evidence of outstanding business progress when we collected our quarterly dividends from Moody’s and Wingstop and became entitled to our quarterly dividends from Alphabet 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 223 consecutive dividend increases across our portfolio companies, with no decreases. The average rate of these dividend increases is 13.9%.
DivGro in the Press
This week, we featured on Talking Trading. The podcast episode is available on YouTube, Apple and Spotify.
Home Depot
On every earnings call, Home Depot — our US home improvement market leader — highlights its expectation to win share under all market conditions. It has done so with aplomb: Home Depot has multiplied its dividend in excess of 5000x since its maiden 1987 dividend and powered a parallel uplift of its share price. Having almost certainly benefited from watching a nascent Walmart in action, Home Depot understood the flywheel whereby extra market share begets extra sales, which drive buying power and in turn lower costs. Moreover, instead of pocketing that extra margin, Home Depot understood that if it shares most of these benefits with customers via lower prices, those customers will stick — probably forever. For almost half a century, Home Depot has rinsed and repeated this process — and today enjoys a 20% market share in an over one-trillion-dollar marketplace, alongside sister DivGro holding Lowe’s with a circa 13% market share. Combined, these home-repair behemoths can profitably price their merchandise below the cost of competitors, forcing prospective entrants to lose money if they tried to compete and in turn reinforcing Home Depot’s expectation to continuously grow its share. Notwithstanding that US homeowners are currently moving less and postponing upgrades, homes — over half of which are now more than 40 years old — nevertheless age and ultimately require repair and upgrades. Given Home Depot is the lowest-cost producer, with a dominant and increasing market share in a growing marketplace, its unique set of privileges suggest it is excellently positioned to extend its formidable dividend growth record.