Exactly what we want to hear from the CFO

Disclosure. I own Apple stock (tick­er: AAPL).

Last night we heard Apple’s CEO and CFO share last quar­ter’s results. As a share­hold­er, I paid atten­tion to the call — this time through Twitter. I have a sinus infec­tion which pre­vent­ed me from lis­ten­ing to the call live. I’m still wait­ing for the record­ing to become avail­able, I will lis­ten then.

An increasing dividend

This tweet caught my atten­tion:

Luca: We are going to keep increas­ing the quar­ter­ly cash div­i­dend every year.

— Neil Cybart (@neilcybart) April 26, 2016

(I’m refer­ring to the tweet about the div­i­dend, my blog soft­ware seems to present two tweets even though I’m link­ing to just one.)

Luca is Apple’s CFO. He can’t just say any­thing he wants. In fact, as I’m writ­ing this anoth­er exec­u­tive state­ment that comes to mind is a good exam­ple:

https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/699376240709402624

In spite of that tweet, Kanye’s album was soon avail­able every­where else. He and Jay Z, own­er of Tidal, are being sued.

Apple’s results

In any case, Apple raised their div­i­dend 10% last night. It now has a return of about 2.28%. They’ve com­mit­ted to rais­ing the div­i­dend every year (for the time being) and have the cash to back it up (over $220 Billion). And, Tim Cook even men­tioned that he thinks US tax reform is a mat­ter of “when, not if” on the call, which means they’ll be able to bring back a lot of that cash from over­seas.

I do not rec­om­mend stocks. I hope to edu­cate peo­ple about invest­ing, not advise them. So I want to be clear.

That said, these Apple state­ments are the sort of stuff that when using the Elephant’s Paycheck Blueprint we look for in pick­ing our invest­ments.