What a week it was again! Unfortunately I couldn’t spend my time on creating new content for the blog due to the seasonality at my job, but that’s luckily about to finish soon again.

And that’s good news, because I have a lot of ideas for new content in the pipeline 😉

It doesn’t mean I didn’t do anything though, because last Friday we recorded our latest podcast episode of Dividend Talk. This time we looked into Berkshire Hathaway’s latest 13-F filing to analyze what changes they made in their investment portfolio.

Have a listen to the last episode, but I can tell you already that I was quite impressed with their 13% quarter-over-quarter growth in portfolio value 👌 (Spotify | Anchor.FM)

Having said that, enjoy this article and afterwards the remainder of your weekend!

5-Bullet Sunday is a weekly blog post with 5 topics that were on my mind this week related to Financial Independence and Dividend Growth Investing or something that just fed my curiosity. An overview of earlier posts can be found here

🌟 Chubb also buying back shares in 2021

Chubb ($CB) is one of my favorite European insurance companies together with Munich Re. They both have a very strong dividend growth history and they are both proud members of the Noble 30 index.

Today I wanted to briefly highlight Chubb’s latest announcement in which they proposed another Share Repurchase program. The company has authorized itself to buyback shares for a total amount of 1.5 billion until the end of December 2021.

Some of the longer-term followers know that I’m not too often a fan of share buybacks and especially when a company is clearly overvalued or leveraging it’s balance sheet. To me, Apply buying back shares at these lofty prices makes utterly no sense to me. I rather see them increasing their dividends so that I can find better opportunities in the stock market for that money.

However, this time I’m actually quite happy with Chubb’s decision. I believe that the company is not that highly valued and a 1.5 Billion USD in share buyback means a 2.25% reduction in outstanding shares.

The company can easily absorb it with it’s cash flow and their balance sheet is more than strong enough. Hence, I see this as a Shareholder wealth creating initiative.

We will see what the stock market will do going forward, because buying back Chubb shares at a price of 200 USD would also make no sense to me, but for now I’m very satisfied with this announcement.

🌟 Ahold Delhaize Q3 Results

Not that long ago Ahold Delhaize ($AMS:AD) reported their 3rd Quarter earnings results and I finally had the time to go through the numbers. I must say that I’m pretty impressed about how the company is firing on all cylinders this year.

I know that the pandemic has been a major tailwind for many supermarket chains due to people and their stock piling. Nevertheless I find it impressive how a company can also turn this into an opportunity.

So let’s go through some of their numbers:

👍 Sales where up 6.8% to 17.8 Billion
👍 Comparable sales grew with about 10%
👍 Online sales growth is really steep, especially in the US
👍 Bol.com keeps growing rapidly despite Amazon having entered the Dutch online retail market

👎 US Pension Plan withdrawal had a strong negative impact on their IFRS numbers and especially their free cash flow

All in all I find these very positive numbers and it keeps confirming my strong confidence in this company. It’s currently my 5th largest position in the portfolio with 357 shares.

🌟 Recent Dividend Announcements

This is typically the time of the year that many US dividend paying companies announce changes in their dividends and this week I would like to call out a few of them.

Nike ($NKE) announced a 12% increase in their dividend and it’s their 19th consecutive annual increase. The company currently trades at ~80 P/E with a dividend yield of 0.83%. I don’t own any shares yet, but I wouldn’t mind to buy some whenever a proper dip happens (at max a third of the current price 😂).

Aflac ($AFL) really blasted many investors away with a 17.9% dividend increase. This is their 38th consecutive increase and the company currently trades at ~7 P/E with a dividend yield of 3%. You will need to dive a bit deeper though into the numbers to verify the correctness of the low price to earnings multiple.

Merck ($MRK) announced a 6.56% increase in their dividend and this marked their 10th consecutive dividend increase. The company currently trades at a 17.6 P/E with a dividend yield of 3.23%. You would actually be accompanied by Warren Buffett if you own this stock, because just recently he initiated a position in the stock.

Siemens (ETR:SIE) just recently announced a dividend cut of 11.3% as part of their fourth quarter earnings. I was a bit surprised by this, because fundamentally the dividend cut wasn’t needed. Unfortunately this means that it will be removed from the Noble 30 Index. I’ll let you know soon with which company Siemens will be replaced.

Costco Wholesale ($COST) just announced a special dividend of 10 USD and this is quite a huge amount. Just to put it in perspective: their regular dividend yield is 0.73% and they are now going to pay out a special dividend of 2.7% on top of that. The special dividend will be paid to shareholders on record at 2 December.

🌟 Recommended Reads

Engineer My Freedom is on a roll lately with the amount of post he’s publishing. That said, I really enjoyed his latest post about the 5 best Irish Dividend Stocks. It’s a small country, but it doesn’t mean you can’t find any hidden gems there! And this is what I find so interesting, because we can all learn from each other about dividend stocks in other European countries. So if you know more of such kind of posts then let me know and I’ll be more than happy to share them in one of the upcoming 5-Bullet Sundays.

Beurswolf wrote a very interesting article called “an ode to taxes“. I liked how he explained a bit more about the background in the Eurozone and how he also compared it to the United States. Taxes are just one of those things that are for certain in life and there shouldn’t be a taboo around it. All I can say is that I can see that we are born and raised in the same country, because I 100% agree with his conclusion.

Unilever has announced a new goal to achieve 1 Billion of sales from meat and dairy alternatives. I think it’s worth a read, because I very strongly believe in health consciousness as a secular growth trend. This is one of the reasons why I own Danone and I’m very happy that Unilever is also becoming more aggressive on this trend. PS: Vegan ice cream is just as tasty!

🌟 Recommended Videos

Howard Marks is not well known in the Retail Investor community, but if you do your research about successful investors then you will definitely stumble upon his name.

I’ve been following him for some time now and I find him very clever. He’s not the typical growth investor like Cathie Wood and I would rather call him a risk analyst when it comes to investing.

Some time ago he also published a book called “the most important thing” in which he describes his approach to the stock market and investing. If you don’t have time to read a whole book, then I would recommend the just watch the below book summary.

That’s it for the week. I hope that you enjoyed this week’s 5-Bullet Sunday 🙏

As always, have a lovely week ahead!

PS: don’t forget that every comment = 1 Euro to Kiva.

Yours Truly,

European Dividend Growth Investor

Disclosure: I own $CB, $AMS:AD & $ETR:SIE. I don’t own $NKE, $AFL, $MRK and $COTS