Citigroup’s Dividend Yield Now Trails Its Peers, But I’m Still Bullish

Dividend yields can be perplexing at times, given the two moving parts: the dividend payout, the numerator in the equation, and the stock price, the denominator. More often than not, companies with very high dividend yields are in trouble, and the high yield is due to a crash in their share prices.

Citigroup (C) is a case in point here. The stock’s dividend yield was well north of 4% when I started covering it in 2023. At that point, its large-cap banking peers, including Bank of America (BAC), J.P. Morgan Chase (JPM), and Wells Fargo (WFC), which, along with Citi, are the top four U.S. banks by assets, had a dividend yield in the ballpark of 2.5%.