Terry

My feeling is that one should not start a new holding of such a share but, if you hold it already, then hang on and look at the results in the longer term before deciding to cull it. I have held TW. for some time in the expectation of recovery. They have come up with one of these schemes, which may turn out to be a 2% normal yield plus sporadic special dividends. I am reserving judgement for at least 12 months.

Wise words indeed.

I was quite disappointed when I bought Persimmon in May 2008 and it aggressively cut its interim dividend in the October followed in March 2009 by a suspension of its final dividend. I watched as the share price dropped to a 62% capital loss. As the share price started to slowly climb again I decided that I'd keep my holding until (hopefully) the capital value was back in the black. At the time I decided that Persimmon was too cyclical to be held in a HYP but I decided to treat it as another lesson learned in my HYP education.

Well, I'm now sitting on a capital gain of around 14% so on a DL forward yield of only 1.9% I should be thinking about selling and ploughing the released capital into a more stable HYP candidate. The recent dividend policy announcement however means I'm going to give this a little more thought. Your words sum this up nicely for me.

Degsy