NEW: S&P Credit Ratings, Better Company Descriptions, Better Beta, and more

I'm excited to share several improvements to ring in the New Year! Let's dive right in.

Credit ratings impact a company's ability to access financing, especially during economic downturns when financial conditions tighten and lenders become more risk averse.

In turn, companies may cut dividends to protect or improve their credit ratings. The weaker a company's credit rating, the more pressure management may feel to preserve cash to improve the company's balance sheet.

Behind the scenes, we've always looked at a company's credit rating when analyzing dividend risk and assigning Dividend Safety Scores.

And starting today, you have access to this important metric, too!

 We partnered with S&P (and paid a pretty penny!) to provide access to their credit ratings. We think you'll find them really handy when evaluating your holdings and researching new opportunities.

Speaking of which, you'll find Credit Rating as a column throughout the site...

... and as a filter in the Screener:

 We hope you enjoy having credit ratings at your fingertips!

Understanding how a business makes money is step one when researching a stock. Yet, the company descriptions we sourced from a vendor were often long-winded and missed the key point: the company's primary revenue sources.

No more! We spent the last couple months rewriting nearly a thousand of the descriptions on our site to help you quickly come up to speed with how a business makes money.

We think these descriptions hit just the right balance between brevity and usefulness. We hope you agree!

Beta measures a stock's volatility relative to the market and can be useful for building a portfolio that holds up better during market downturns.

We had been sourcing beta from a vendor but recently chose to bring the calculation in-house, which led to two major improvements.

First, beta is now calculated across virtually every U.S. stock and fund we cover. (Our data vendor's coverage was limited, with some popular stocks surprisingly without beta.)

Second, we switched to a five-year period for calculating beta. Previously, beta was measured over only the last twelve months, but anything can happen in a year. A five-year period felt to us like a better predictor of a stock's future volatility.

While we were at it, we made a long-requested change to assign a beta of zero to cash balances. Cash reduces a portfolio's volatility, so if you have a significant holding in cash, your portfolio's overall beta now reflects this reduced sensitivity to market movements.

Several ETFs (YMAX, QDTE, XDTE, and a few others) popped up recently that pay weekly dividends, so we updated our projection system to make sure their yields are calculated correctly and they're shown correctly in your Income Calendar.

That's it for now! Thanks for being a customer or for trying our service. We're all ears to any feedback you have on these new features as well as any ideas you have for improvements.

Just hit "reply" or reach out anytime — we respond to every email.

Happy investing,

Matt De Leon

Co-founder, Simply Safe Dividends