DTD, which allocates a combined 34% of its weight financials and tech, added $134.7 million of its $565 million last year. DGRW features a nearly 20% weight to tech, one of the largest weights to that sector among all U.S. dividend ETFs. The ETF added $176 million of its $358.5 million in AUM last year. DGRW and DTD returned an average of 13.4% in 2014.
Importantly, there is plenty of room for big bank dividends to grow in 2015. US Bancorp’s payout would need to rise another 73% just to get back to what the bank paid in 2008. Bank of America’s (NYSE: BAC) dividend is up 400% this year, but at 5 cents per quarter, that dividend is nowhere close to the 64 cents a share paid for the third quarter of 2008. [Banking on Bank ETFs for Dividend Growth]
“2015 should easily set another record for cash dividend payments. A word of caution: while the dollar aggregate of dividend cuts were flat for the fourth quarter, over half the cuts came from energy issues. Lower oil prices and oil price uncertainty, both of which hurt energy stocks over the past six-months and devastated many small-cap energy issues, have spilled over to the dividend world. This is not the financial dividend meltdown of 2008 and 2009, but energy does account for over 11% of dividends in the general market. If lower oil prices cut into earnings and cash-flow, dividends could eventually be hurt,” according to Silverblatt.
WisdomTree Total Dividend Fund
Tom Lydon’s clients own shares of DVY. Todd Shriber owns shares of DGRW.