Dividend Champions 100th Edition

The Dividend Champions spreadsheet and PDF have been updated through 2/29/16 and are available at here. Note that all references to Champions mean companies that have paid higher dividends for at least 25 straight years; Contenders have streaks of 10-24 years; Challengers have streaks of 5-9 years. "CCC" refers to the universe of Champions, Contenders, and Challengers.
100 Editions and Counting
The latest compilation of the Dividend Champions spreadsheet marks a milestone that I never envisioned when I put together a list of companies that had paid higher dividends for at least 25 straight years back in December of 2007. After posting the list as of December 25, 2007 and January 15, 2008, I settled on a month-end schedule and eight years later, that simple 79k file had evolved into a listing of data on well over 700 companies with at least five years of higher dividends crammed into a file that is about to top 3 megabytes in size. Many thanks to fellow Seeking Alpha author Robert Allen Schwartz for creating and maintaining an archive of previous spreadsheets here for anyone interested in that historical perspective. This month, I've added a Population Change Reconciliation below the CCC Aging on the Summary tab. There, you'll see, for example, that the increase of 13 companies in 2016 is composed of 29 additions (new Challengers) and 16 Deletions and that the expansion by 142 companies in 2015 obscures the fact that 209 new companies were added during the... Read more