No. of Recommendations: 14
Much of the conversation about the dividend thing is absurd, and wrong to boot. First of all, there is no evidence that a good company adding a dividend results in a higher stock price long-term. Second of all, a dividend results in a substantial drag over time when the owners plan to donate it at, or near, their death.
Take the Gottesman's for example (I've discussed this before a number of times), they owned Berkshire for about 50 years. Had Berkshire distributed a small dividend of 1.5% a year, then on average over the years, they would have paid roughly 0.5% a year in taxes. That comes to about 25% of the total overall. Furthermore, since the company would be distributing 1.5% a year, then growth would be about 1.5% lower (very roughly), then the company would have about 1.5% lower growth, so the stock price would be a little lower today. Instead of donating $1 billion to the medical school, they may have only been able to donate $600 million or so.
So if you claim that over time that foundations would receive MORE money by receiving dividend yielding stocks over non dividend stocks, that is probably an incorrect assertion.
