Hi Claude,
I had to do a double take - this is more complicated that i thought. OK - so LIF typically announces a quarterly dividend and often a special dividend. Depending on the data provider they will either include the special dividend or not in the calcuation of the yield. Our data provider does - those that do not have the yield closer to 8%.
However, the company actually released this last month:
https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/labrador-iron-ore-royalty-corporation-cash-dividend-for-the-fourth-quarter-of-2020-1-80-per-common-share-858223316.html
As you can see, they are also trying to get that under control. So with that in mind, typically how the forward yield is calculated is by using the current quarterly dividend and multiplying it by 4 - which gives you $7.20 yearly based on this $1.80 per share. That would be a yield of around 22%.
What you are going to see is that the quarterly dividend will NOT be stable QoQ - it will fluctuate which will mean the yield will be very difficult to calculate. In fact, the company said exactly that in the release. If you look at historical yield, it is $3.05/33.43 = 9.01%. So this is likely the more accurate yield. The problem is the all data providers use forward yield as their "yield" metric which makes sense because one would expect that dividend to be consistent QoQ. In this case, it won't be and investors will have to manually calculated the dividend to figure it out.
So the dividend will be sustainable, but it won't always be $1.80 per share. Interesting question - thanks for bringing this forward and will be good for others to see this. It'll be messy with LIF for dividend investors.
Mat
Mat