Computershare said that dividend growth in the fourth quarter accelerated by an underlying rate of 15.6%. It added that the boost was largely driven by the performance of HSBC, which fully restored quarterly payouts in 2023 for the first time since the pandemic. Figures from the Computershare Dividend Monitor show that companies paid out £88.5 billion last year in the form of regular dividends, up 5.4% on 2022. Special, or one-off, dividend payments boosted the total figure to £90.5 billion, down 3.7% on the previous year.
Latest figures from the Investment Association (IA) show that, overall, money flowed into the investment sector in the first month of this year, stemming a 10-month run of net withdrawals. As the Dublin-based, FTSE 100 listed company pointed out, it expects the US to be a key driver of future growth, while North America is responsible for three-quarters of the business’s group earnings. Customers will still pay fees charged by the underlying investment provider, for example, annual fees charged by fund managers. Commentators acknowledge that this is a challenging period for banks in the US. But they add that it is likely bank share prices across the globe will stabilise once it becomes clearer that this was an isolated incident and that the lessons of the 2008 crisis were learned.
Sportswear retailer JD Sports has been named the market analysts’ best-loved FTSE 100 stock of 2022 based on the number of ‘buy, porn games free ‘sell’ and ‘hold’ notes issued to those monitoring its shares, Andrew Michael writes. UK companies paid share dividends worth £94.3 billion in 2022, up from £87.3 billion a year earlier, according to Link Group, the fund administration service, Andrew Michael writes. Passively managed funds, such as ETFs and index trackers, are computer-driven and backed by ,porn games free, algorithms to mimic an investing benchmark. Active funds rely on investment professionals putting together a basket of securities to outperform a specific stock index. Investment funds worth nearly £20 billion have been named as consistently underperforming ‘dogs’ by online investing service Bestinvest, writes Andrew Michael. It added that money market funds were themselves seeing net withdrawals for the first three quarters of 2022 when "Q4 saw the tables turn with a vengeance".