Member Info for JABH

Oh crikey. Yes, I suppose if you bought in at about £4.45 and then they dropped to 20p, and now they're worth about 18p in old money that would probably add up. Well, I hope you got some decent dividend payments in the ISA before they crashed. You might have £1,000 or more if you're lucky.

RBS shares became NatWest Shares at a ratio of 1:1.
However, prior to this, and following the financial crisis, there was an RBS share consolidation in which 10 shares (worth 20p each on Friday 1st June 2012) were consolidated into 1 share with a value of 200p.
So if you had 1347 RBS shares in 2008, they were probably worth £277.40 on 1st June 2012, and were then converted to 134.7 shares worth exactly the same on Wednesday 6th June.
Today, 135 NatWest shares are worth about £240.
There was also a dividend in June 2008 of 33.2p that you may have earned (would be £447.20 on 1347 shares), as well as 13p in April 2019 (£17.55 on 135 shares) and 14p in September 2019 (£18.90 on 135 shares). A little more perhaps if automatic dividend reinvestment was setup.
Good luck with your search.

Oh good point. I mis-read that. Earnings Surprise Prediction. I suspect they will want to return a specified level of excess capital though rather than basing dividend on earnings per share over the last FY period. I'd like to think A J Bell had it closer to the mark at 11p but wouldn't we all! Lets see. :-)

Predicting 8.2p

https://www.ig.com/uk/news-and-trade-ideas/natwest---barclays-share-prices-in-strong-form-ahead-of-full-yea-210216

11p doesn't sound crazy too me. I think that's distinctly possible. Especially if they announce release of bad debt provisions.

As a shareholder you will be eligible for whatever dividend is announced. No one will be paid dividends because they used to hold shares last year and don't any more.
However, the Bank is very unlikely to pay out everything it was intending to pay during the regulatory ban plus the expected dividend for this year. It would appear lavish and the Bank is very, very conscious of the optics of that as well as sustainability and doing the right thing. The dividend will be quite moderate I would have thought and then the analysts will mark the SP down by the value of the dividend on ex-div date anyway so you will make a loss first and then break even. Question is whether the results and economic outlook are positive enough that the SP will grow more than the mark down.

I figured the SP might take a bit of a hit today due to yesterday's story in which BoE Governor warned that EU could cut UK out of its financial markets (or rather not re-grant access given that we already lost access on 1st Jan). Whatever happens though (access to EU markets or not) he did state that London would "undoubtedly continue as one of the world's leading if not the leading financial centre".

Also promising:

https://amp.ft.com/content/442e7d88-4d5e-4251-95ae-950077b70b39

I think the things we need to watch out for are: (1) negative interest rates (2) deterioration in trade relations between UK and EU now that Brexit is done (3) any bad news about vaccine supply/efficacy and covid mutations.
I'm also really hoping that the Bank strikes a slightly more upbeat tone in the FY results. They really do have a habit of setting expectations low (gloomy outlook, worst case scenario etc) so that they can dial back from it later if required. The only problem with that is those gloomy predictions in the results pack have a material impact on the SP.
That being said I'm very happy with the recent SP increase. My losses have pretty much halved thanks to the recent rally. I'll be even around £1.94 and in a decent position at about £2.25. However, you have to remember that this share was at £2.51 in December 2019 and that was with all of the Brexit uncertainty, and the US/China trade war, and threat of US/Iran WWIII piled on. With those issues resolved, back in profit, paying dividends again, it really was in a good position to rise steadily beyond £2.50 so that what I'm looking for over 2021 and beyond. I've said it before though, NWG SP is like a barometer for UK economy. The fundamentals of the company take a back seat. So it's really the macro-economic bad news that hurts us (and who knows what's next in that regard), and things like future success of Brexit, end of lockdown/pandemic, economic bounceback etc that put the wind in the sails of the SP.

@JimJam I have to say, dividends bother me. I don't fully understand them. Or rather, I don't understand the way the SP is manipulated on ex-div date. The thinking seems to be that the Analysts mark down the SP according to how much capital is being taken out of the business to distribute to Shareholders. So, yes, you get a nice cash injection, but then the value of your shareholding just takes the equivalent hit on ex-div date so you end up being put into a position of nil gain. What's confusing is that NWG is a highly capital generative business and not only do the Analysts *not* mark the SP back up when it re-accrues billions of pounds worth of capital to replace what it dispersed, but even the market often won't drive that positive reflection in the SP because the stock is far more tied to what people think is going to happen to the UK and Global economies in the short/medium term than it is to the fundamentals of the company. So for example, you might get a 15p dividend announcement equating to, say, £10bn capital distribution; on ex-div date all your shares are marked down by 15p (you're in a loss); on dividend payment date you get your 15p per share back (you've broken even); 6 months later the Bank has re-accrued the £10bn that it gave out but the share price hasn't gone back to where it was because people are worried about a pandemic, or a trade war, or a Marxist UK government, or a Brexit, or the collapse of the EU, or a Scottish independence referendum. So dividends don't actually net us anything and over time the Analysts continually mark the SP down by the amount dispersed to the point that the stock is virtually worthless. Obviously it's not going to go that far but that's what I don't understand about having a process where you manually mark the SP down but you don't have a process for manually marking the SP back up for the same reasons. Maybe someone on here can explain it to me.
I hope that the SP will climb as we get towards FY results, and that results beat expectations. I imagine that the Bank previously took more provisions than necessary which would be good news, but NWG has a tendency towards gloomy predictions. Resumption of dividend payments should help to increase the SP and I hope it will push the SP up more than the announced dividend itself. I also imagine that given that Rishi is on-track to be the first Chancellor to spend £1tn in a year, we have a greater chance of the Government selling down its shareholding sooner. That will depress the SP in the immediate term but will improve it eventually.
Looking at the SP, the absolute low point of late was in Sept 2020. From there we climbed for a couple of months to Nov 2020. And in the last couple of months since Nov its been up and down a little. However, the 155 that we are at right now is pretty much the low of the last 2 months' volatility. So if I had spare cash, I think I would probably buy in now ahead of the results, particularly if you can be patient and hold.

@JimJam Alison Rose has said that she wants to resume dividend payments as soon as possible after the regulatory suspension was lifted. That has happened now so a dividend will be announced in Feb, will go ex-div in Mar, and paid in April. The results pack for FY 2019 shows that a dividend of 8p (5+3) was announced in Feb 2020 and I believe that one was subsequently cancelled. I think 8p would be below the PRA cap that says Banks can distribute the higher of 25% of 2 years profits or 20bps of RWAs, however it might not be much below the cap. I wonder if they will start moderate at 8p/10p and perhaps increase from there? They won't want to be seen to be cavalier in the face of the ongoing pandemic.

A few weeks ago an article appeared on seekingalpha.com and they had their own views about dividends:

[EXCERPT]

Its last full year dividend (2018) totalled 13p. In 2019 it was on course to pay out 22p in dividends for 2019 before the dividend suspension during the year meant the final two payments were not paid. This 22p figure includes special dividends, but at today’s price of 168p, it would represent a prospective yield of 13% were the bank to pay at that level in 2021 or indeed 2022.

There are grounds to expect that it will payout at least at that level. Not only is the business performing fine, but the suspension of dividends and share buybacks means that the company has saved cash which could be returned to shareholders.

A Price Above 200p in 2021 is on the Cards
I expect the shares to get above 200p in 2021. That would still represent a prospective yield of 11%, which is highly attractive. A general rerating of the bank sector could help reach this price target, but I also expect that any announcement of a resumption of dividend payments would lead to an upwards rerating from today’s price.

Even after the price rises over the past couple of months, NatWest continues to offer good value in my view.

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4397925-natwest-upside-price-drivers-in-2021

"Bonus trough wider and deeper than divi pot, and refilled more often. So says Peppa ..."

Where does this information come from?

The last annual bonus pot was £300m. The last dividend (interim+special) was £1,700m. And there would have been a second dividend six months later if BoE hadn't banned the Banks from paying them.

You can easily Google this information. Or you can just carry on making stuff up I guess but it's unhelpful to the rest of us.

@Dinoken - I didn't say it wasn't terrible. I just asked why you thought it was. I'm not an expert although I do know that mortgages contribute to something like 40% of the NWG profit even with these historically low interest rates. So more prime mortgages would seem to be a good thing. BoE also warned that the UK is currently vulnerable to a sharp rise in inflation which they said they would tightly control by raising interest rates. If interest rates go up then a bigger mortgage book will be a more profitable one. Meanwhile, Metro has only sold off a third of its mortgage book. So if it's bad news for NWG to have acquired one third, why would it be so rosy for Metro to have retained twice as much, two thirds. As for Metro reaching £3 SP by 2021, that's a great forecast for shareholders who bought in since August last year. For shareholders who bought in during the 3.5 years prior, even £3 would still be a loss.

@Dinoken Why is the Metro purchase "terrible"?

And Merry Christmas to one and all!

It might be when the deal gets voted through on the 30th that you get more of an escalation. It's not done until it's done is it so it might be that major investors hold out for that parliamentary ratification before piling in.

Looking good! Very exciting!!!

Opened up this morning as MPs have been primed to vote for a possible UK/EU trade deal at the beginning of next week.

https://amp.theguardian.com/business/2020/dec/10/uk-banks-get-go-ahead-to-restart-limited-dividends-and-bonuses

"Lenders have now been urged to limit payouts to either 25% of profits over 2019 and 2020 combined, excluding previous dividend payments, or 0.2% of the value of their riskiest assets, whichever is highest."

It occurred to me that even if the EU/UK negotiators announce a deal this weekend, I think Boris needs to agree it with Ursula in principle, and then I think the EU members formally vote on it. So I guess it's not a done-done deal until that vote but I suspect that the EU negotiators will only announce a trade deal this weekend that is within the limits of what the key EU members have stated as being acceptable terms. So I suppose any jump in SP on Monday following a weekend announcement might be limited until the formal vote has locked it in.

According to anonymous EU official speaking to The Telegraph.

Sounds like an agreement likely over the weekend. Could be a very good Monday!