It’s been a little over three months since we visited the Death Care Index or DCI.  The DCI is Funeral Director Daily’s gauge for checking up on the investment return of death care companies who operate in the public ownership market.  At the close of business on November 30, a day in which the Dow Jones Industrials reached a new high the DCI stood at $272.76 per share.

The DCI is easily calculated as it is the sum of ownership of one share of stock in each of the following death care industry companies:  Assurant, Hillenbrand, StoneMor, Carriage Services, Matthews International, and Service Corporation International.  So, if you owned one share of each of those stocks the value at the close of business on November 30 would have been $272.76.  That is up over $11 or about 4.3% since we last checked in on August 22.  The DCI as of November 30 would pay a dividend of $6.04 annually or a yield of 2.21%.

However, when we started tracking the DCI – on March 3, 2017, the DCI stood at $269.84 so your gain if you owned at that time until November 30 would only be about 1.1%.  In the same time period the DJIA has moved from 21,005 to 24,272 – a gain of over 15.5%.  Our opinion is that while there are great companies in the death care industry, the professional investor is still looking to see how the industry is going to remain profitable in the direct cremation era and who those companies will be that set the pace and deliver results.  We also believe that the professional investor is pretty bearish on the industry right now, however, being a contrarian and backing the right company could be a very profitable move.

The DCI, from here on out,  will also be adding two more companies to our index to give us an even broader scope of the death care index across the marketplace.  We will be adding the Park Lawn Corporation based out of Toronto and the Security National Corporation out of Utah to the mix.  Using November 30 prices with these two companies in would give the new DCI (what we will be basing on going forward) a price of $298.36 with a dividend payment of $6.49 for a yield of 2.17%.

This change moves us into what we believe is a more equalized base of companies.  We now have two companies in the financial sector of death care (Assurant and Security National), two companies in the manufacturing segment (Hillenbrand and Matthews) and four companies in the retail to consumer segment (SCI, Carriage Services, StoneMor, and Park Lawn).  In addition, SCI and Carriage have traditionally been funeral home based companies and StoneMor and Park Lawn have cut their teeth on the cemetery side.