Sampling Dividend Cuts In February 2016

While we're waiting for S&P's official tally of all the dividend cut declarations made in February 2016, which should be posted sometime later today, we thought we'd get a jump on what to expect by extracting a sample of the dividend cuts that our primary sources for real-time dividend cut announcements recorded during February 2016 to get a sense of what that report is likely to indicate.
The picture isn't good - the pace of dividend cuts during the current quarter of 2016-Q1 has now exceeded the level seen at this same point of time a year earlier. What makes this especially bad news is that the year ago quarter, 2015-Q1, was the worst quarter for dividend cuts in all of 2015.

The table below summarizes the data we've collected on the individual dividend cuts that we were able to sample throughout February 2016. The link for the company name will take you to the respective announcement or declaration, while clicking the stock ticker symbol will take you to the company's latest stock price quotes.
Sampling of February 2016 Dividend Cut Announcements and Declarations Date Company (Ticker) Old Dividendper Share New Dividendper Share PercentChange 1 Feb 2016 PDL BioPharma (Nasdaq: PDLI) $0.15 $0.05 -66.7% 2 Feb 2016 Twin Disc (Nasdaq: TWIN) $0.09 $0.00 -100.0% 2 Feb 2016 Rent-A-Center (NYSE: RCII) $0.24 $0.08 -66.7% 3 Feb 2016 Apollo Global Management (NYSE: APO) $0.35 $0.28 -20.0% 3 Feb 2016 ECA Marcellus Trust I (NYSE: ECT) $0.07 $0.07... Read more