Particularly during times of market unrest and risk aversion, dividends assume greater prominence as a cushion.

 

Standard & Poor's has extended its series of dividend-focused indexes, adding benchmarks covering Asia, Australia, Europe, Japan and several emerging markets.

Outside of Europe, S&P has never had a dividend-specific index for the other regions and countries covered in the new index launches.

The timing of the launch is not unrelated to the widespread market problems and equities sell-off, according to a company statement about the new products.

Particularly during times of market unrest and risk aversion, dividends assume greater prominence as a cushion against declining equity prices, S&P's index services group points out.

S&P research also shows that dividend-paying issues have outperformed nonpaying issues more in down markets than in up markets. As an example, the S&P 500 was down 36.66% year-to-date, and 20.26% for the current quarter, based on S&P data through

...