Equus Total Return Inc (EQS)

Equus Total Return, Inc. is a business development company (BDC) specializing in leveraged buyouts, management buyouts, corporate partnerships/joint ventures, growth and expansion capital, acquisition financing, roll-up acquisition strategies, operational turnarounds, recapitalizations of existing businesses, special situations, equity and equity-oriented securities issued by privately owned companies, debt securities including subordinate debt, debt convertible into common or preferred stock, or debt combined with warrants and common and preferred stock, and preferred equity financing. It invests in middle market companies and acts as a lead investor. It invests in technology, telecommunication, financial services, natural resource and industrial manufacturing and services. It invests in companies engaged in the alternative energy, real estate, healthcare, education, e-learning, leisure and entertainment, and foreign investment sector in the United States, China, India, and Europe. It investments include common and preferred stock, debt convertible into common or preferred stock, debt combined with warrants and options, and other rights to acquire common or preferred stock. It seeks to invest in companies between $1 million and $25 million with revenues between $5 million and $150 million with EBITDA between $2 million and $50 million. It seeks to take control and non-control equity positions. Equus Total Return, Inc. was founded in 1991 and is based in Houston, Texas with additional office in Vancouver, Canada.

EQS is a business development company — a listed vehicle that lends to, and sometimes takes equity in, private middle-market businesses. It elects regulated-investment-company treatment, which requires it to distribute the large majority of its taxable income each year; that requirement, not a board's generosity, is what produces the high headline yield.

The payment is a distribution rather than interest, and it can include return of capital as well as net investment income and realised gains. Most of it is taxed as ordinary income rather than as qualified dividends. The loan book is valued by the manager, not by a market, so net asset value is an estimate. Read how BDCs work.

Figures on this page are computed by Income Investing from the payment history and last price stored in our own database; the payment records come from fmp and the price from fmp, last recomputed Aug 25, 2026. They describe what has been paid, not what will be paid. Yield, payout ratio, our data sources and our methodology are explained elsewhere on the site.

The table lists the 23 most recent recorded dividends for EQS, newest first, with ex-dates running from Dec 17, 1992 to Mar 05, 2009. The latest is $0.1080 per share in USD, ex-date Mar 05, 2009, pay date —. Measured against the nearest payment about a year earlier, 8 are higher, 8 lower and 1 unchanged; the remaining 6 have no comparable payment in the record. None is flagged as a special or one-off payment. Payment records supplied by fmp.

The chart covers 10 complete calendar years for EQS, 2000 to 2009, per share, in USD. Each bar totals the regular dividends with an ex-dividend date in that calendar year. The year is assigned by ex-dividend date, which is not necessarily the issuer's own dividend year. Our stored payment history for EQS begins in 1992. The total went from $0.6000 in 2000 to $0.1080 in 2009 — 82% lower. Within that span 1 year was higher than the year before and 6 lower. The three most recent years shown are 2007 $0.5000, 2008 $0.6080 and 2009 $0.1080. The current year is still in progress and is left out, and special or one-off payments are excluded. This is a record of what was paid, not a projection. 8 of the years shown do not hold the 4 dividends the recorded cadence implies: 2000 (1 payment), 2001 (0 payments), 2002 (0 payments), 2003 (1 payment), 2004 (1 payment), 2005 (0 payments), 2006 (2 payments) and 2009 (1 payment). Those years are marked on the chart and named in the table. A year with one more or one fewer payment than the cadence implies is usually a payment whose ex-dividend date moved across a year end rather than a change in the payment itself: the payment lands in the neighbouring calendar year, so one year reads high and the next reads low while the rate never moved. The change-on-the-year-before column carries the same distortion, because it compares two totals rather than two payment rates. These totals are arithmetically right for what they measure — regular dividends bucketed by ex-dividend date — but they are not the annual dividend the issuer reports for that year, and where the two disagree the issuer's own published dividend history is the authority.