The Alternative Future Where GE Didn’t Cut Its Dividend

The third week of October 2017 saw the S&P 500 close at a new all time high on each day of the week, which is the first time that’s happened since 1998.

In the meantime, the trajectory of the S&P 500 continues to track along the top edge of the range we first forecast back in early September 2017.

The S&P 500 index continues to track along near the top end of that range, shown as the red-shaded box, in which we assumed that investors would largely remain focused on the distant future quarter of 2018-Q2 as we accounted for the past volatility of stock prices on our dividend futures-based model. That adjustment has another two and a half weeks to run before we expect to be able to return to using the raw projections of our standard model.

From our perspective, one of the bigger stories of the past week was General Electric’s (NYSE: GE) earnings announcement, which had been expected to come with a dividend cut announcement that would have noticeably affected the expectations for future S&P 500 dividends.

As GE announced its earnings before the start of trading on Friday, 20 October 2017, indicating that its future earnings would be on the order of 30% below their previous forecasts as its cash flow was also strained, GE’s stock price at first plunged by 7% of its previous day’s closing value in the day’s pre-market trading.

What didn’t happen however was GE’s anticipated dividend cut announcement. Going by our theory of how stock prices work, where the fundamental driver of stock prices is expectations for their underlying dividends per share, that would mean that the initial reaction of investors to the company’s earnings and cash flow announcement would likely turn out to be a short-lived noise event. And so it was, as GE’s stock price reversed its plunge and went on to close up on the day by 1%, which ZeroHedge described as “GE-Dip-Buying-Panic”.