Not me. I was in it for stock appreciation.
Got in at $30 and got out at $60.
I bought on the news that Activision was buying King.
I follow Warren Buffet’s advice…buy for appreciation over dividends.
Cap gains tax is less then dividend tax.
ATVI’s dividend is crap… not even a 1% yield.
You want dividends then there are lots better companies to choose from.
That’s more the domain of the day traders, margin traders, and other people who are very short-term focused. While they can severely impact stock prices as they’ve become an increasingly significant portion of it. They’re not the entire market, by any stretch of the imagination.
Besides which, those guys rarely remain bought into a particular stock long enough to have any meaningful impact on a board’s composition, unless they’re operating as corporate raiders. So while Corporations have to be mindful of ensuring they don’t allow their stock to become vulnerable to a hostile takeover, there is a bit more going on there than simple short-term gains.
Dividends are huge for the people looking for “income stock” though, so that can make or break a companies stock price depending on the type of investors they’re trying to have “buy and hold” their stock.
Wouldn’t surprise me at all. Kotick is the gift that keeps on giving that consumers really wish he would stop.
Blizzards shareholder profile is built around being an “income stock” as much as possible, meaning mutual funds and other such portfolios(where most stockholders don’t vote) are their target. As such, dividends are very important, as anything that threatens that will in turn cause those portfolios to divest from Activision and seek a more reliable/better paying option instead.
The one thing Activision doesn’t want to see is a contraction on their quarterly profits which proves to sufficient enough to require a cut to the dividend number. So long as they protect the dividend, things are largely happy in terms of their stock value. But that’s where things like personnel cutbacks “for cost savings” start to enter into the picture.
It isn’t so much that Shareholders told them to do that. They just take it as an “understood” thing that if they don’t protect the dividends, their stock prices are likely to tumble.
I guess i never got the memo, then. I’ve never made a single executive decision.
You were using your own money though, and you’re not invested 12% in a company worth billions. You have to play a lot more carefully. But if you could put yourself in Vanguard or Fidelity’s place wouldn’t you do it different? Yeah, you might take a loss, but you also have a bunch of college students that in less than a year are probably going to get their first job with real benefits. Short-term losses aren’t as big of a deal to a company like that. It matters, but there’s enough revenue to be able to stay around for long-term investment and be able to just deal with short-term losses.
ATVI was never a long term investment for me.
Activision has a history with the game companies they buy which is just as bad as EA.