The IGO Ltd (ASX: IGO) share price is down 4% in morning trade to $11.94 per share.
Shares closed yesterday trading for $12.30 apiece.
Now investors could have expected the IGO share price to edge lower today. But not by 4%.
Why are ASX 200 investors hitting the sell button?
The reason the IGO share price was most likely to slip this morning is that the stock is trading ex-dividend today.
On 31 January, the ASX 200 lithium stock reported some stellar half-year results, fuelled by all-time high lithium prices in late 2022.
With profits up a whopping 549% year on year, the board declared a fully franked interim dividend of 14 cents per share. That's a new record-high payout from the company.
As of this morning, shares are trading without rights to that dividend. And you'll commonly see stocks slide by the amount of their dividend payout.
But the IGO share price is down 36 cents per share, not 14 cents
The ex-dividend day explains some of the price fall, but not all.
IGO also is being impacted by broader falls across the market.
The banking crisis looks to have spread from the United States-based SVB collapse to Europe, with some serious concerns about the well-being of Credit Suisse. The bank's shares crashed 24% on the SIX Swiss Exchange overnight.
Investor angst has sent the S&P/ASX 200 Index (ASX: XJO) down 1.9% at the time of writing, with all of the ASX 200 lithium shares strongly underperforming the benchmark. In fact, IGO's shares are holding up better than its rivals.
IGO share price snapshot
As you can see in the chart below, the IGO share price is now down 12% in 2023. Shares are flat over the full year, though investors who held shares over the 12 months will have received two fully franked dividends.
