DiamondEcho wrote:Note further that DL appear to have no capacity for incorporating any non-standard dividends, so they exclude Specials and '''guaranteed''' future dividend plans.
As far as consensus dividend forecasts from anyone are concerned, those depend on the underlying forecasts by individual analysts, with the consensus forecast figures produced from those underlying forecasts by some sort of averaging process. So it's not a question of whether the consensus forecast provider has the capacity to do about non-standard dividends, but of what the individual analysts do.
As an example, see DL's page on Admiral:
http://www.digitallook.com/equity/Admiral_Group
The historical dividends on that page clearly don't take its "specials" into account - that's because DL's systems don't appear to have any ability to cope with them, as you say.
But the forecast dividends on that page equally clearly do take its "specials" into account, and I'm pretty certain that's because Admiral's "specials" have become sufficiently regular and predictable by now that analysts do include them when making their forecasts. DL's systems work from those forecasts and so end up taking the "specials" into account indirectly, even though they don't appear to be able to take them into account directly.
Gengulphus