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Home Bancorp, Inc. (NASDAQ:HBCP) is about to trade ex-dividend in the next 4 days. Typically, the ex-dividend date is one business day before the record date which is the date on which a company determines the shareholders eligible to receive a dividend. The ex-dividend date is of consequence because whenever a stock is bought or sold, the trade takes at least two business day to settle. Meaning, you will need to purchase Home Bancorp's shares before the 3rd of February to receive the dividend, which will be paid on the 17th of February.
The company's next dividend payment will be US$0.25 per share, on the back of last year when the company paid a total of US$0.96 to shareholders. Calculating the last year's worth of payments shows that Home Bancorp has a trailing yield of 2.6% on the current share price of $37.99. Dividends are an important source of income to many shareholders, but the health of the business is crucial to maintaining those dividends. We need to see whether the dividend is covered by earnings and if it's growing.
See our latest analysis for Home Bancorp
Dividends are typically paid out of company income, so if a company pays out more than it earned, its dividend is usually at a higher risk of being cut. Home Bancorp has a low and conservative payout ratio of just 22% of its income after tax.
Companies that pay out less in dividends than they earn in profits generally have more sustainable dividends. The lower the payout ratio, the more wiggle room the business has before it could be forced to cut the dividend.
Click here to see the company's payout ratio, plus analyst estimates of its future dividends.
Have Earnings And Dividends Been Growing?
Companies with consistently growing earnings per share generally make the best dividend stocks, as they usually find it easier to grow dividends per share. Investors love dividends, so if earnings fall and the dividend is reduced, expect a stock to be sold off heavily at the same time. Fortunately for readers, Home Bancorp's earnings per share have been growing at 12% a year for the past five years.
Many investors will assess a company's dividend performance by evaluating how much the dividend payments have changed over time. Home Bancorp has delivered an average of 17% per year annual increase in its dividend, based on the past eight years of dividend payments. It's great to see earnings per share growing rapidly over several years, and dividends per share growing right along with it.
The Bottom Line
Is Home Bancorp worth buying for its dividend? When companies are growing rapidly and retaining a majority of the profits within the business, it's usually a sign that reinvesting earnings creates more value than paying dividends to shareholders. Perhaps even more importantly - this can sometimes signal management is focused on the long term future of the business. Overall, Home Bancorp looks like a promising dividend stock in this analysis, and we think it would be worth investigating further.