The Big Five: TD Canada Trust

Seeing as how the five largest banks in Canada are getting totally hammered on the TSX, I thought it would be a great time to start a series of five on each bank. This ties in well with my new strategy of the "Dog of the Big 5" where I purchase shares in the most attractively priced Canadian bank each year. Almost everyone uses banks to keep their money safe and almost everyone pays banking fees or mortgages. Why not take back some of your hard earned money through dividends and become a shareholder. I think I'll start off with the bank that had the hardest fall from its 52 week high, TD Canada Trust.

The Bank of Toronto was founded back in 1855 and was later merged with the Dominion Bank in 1955 to form, you guessed it, The Toronto Dominion Bank. Then in 2000 The Toronto Dominion Bank acquired Canada Trust and merged to become TD Canada Trust. TD has recently become Canada's largest company by market capitalization at an amazing $65-billion. For those of you that don't know, market capitalization is the total market value of a company's outstanding shares.

Here is a quick summary of TD as of Nov 24, 2011:

Symbol TSX -         TD
Current close price- $68.70
52 Week High-        $86.82
52 Week Low-        $68.55
EPS-                       $5.83
Annual dividend-      $2.72
Current Yield-          3.96%

As for dividends, TD has never missed a dividend payment since 1857. It currently has a very conservative dividend payout ratio of 47%. TD has increased its dividend twice in 2011 by a total of 11.5% after a two year stalemate. The following chart represents TD's dividend and how it's grown since 2000 to its current amount going into 2012.