5 Stocks That Took a Hike

Even if you think you're too old to go trick-or-treating tomorrow night, investors never second-guess corporate candy. A company that asks shareholders to open wide as it throws fatter dividend checks into their open bags is offering some top-notch fiscal treats. A bigger yield usually means that a company is confident about its future earnings power, and that makes the sweet gesture even sweeter. Readers of the Income Investor newsletter can certainly appreciate that kind of thinking.

Let's take a closer look at five of the companies that inched their payouts higher this past week.

We can start with Seagate (NYSE: STX). Wasn't it just a few years ago that industry watchers were writing off hard-drive makers as dead money? Portable storage through things like Zip disks and flash memory-based drives were making bigger drives less necessary. But what do you know? We're now back on the prowl for fat hard drives to store the massive amounts of music and video downloads we're accumulating. It is under that kind of favorable tailwind that we find Seagate boosting its quarterly distribution by 25% to $0.10 a share.

The Aflac (NYSE: AFL) duck didn't duck. He soared, taking the insurer's dividend 23% higher to $0.16 per share every three months. It's actually the second time the company has upped its payout ante this year.

Eaton Vance (NYSE: EV) was another hiker. The mutual fund giant -- which has actually been one of the top-performing stocks over the past few decades -- has had a pretty good run in money management, and its investors keep sharing in that success. The latest dividend hike will grow its quarterly disbursement by 20% to hit $0.12 a share. Eaton Vance shareholders have been spoiled, as the company has increased its dividend for 26 straight years at a compound annual rate of 21%.

Then we have Charles Schwab (Nasdaq: SCHW), with one of the more generous upticks. Its quarterly dividend per share may be going up by just two pennies to a full nickel, but that still represents a 67% upgrade. The Motley Fool Stock Advisor recommendation is coming off a better-than-expected third quarter. The leading discount broker certainly has the flexibility to cover the new rate. The $0.21 a share it earned would, in theory, be enough to cover a full year of dividends at the new rate.

Finally, we have Shaw Communications (NYSE: SJR). The company raised its monthly dividend by a whopping 67%. It is now the annual equivalent of $1 a share. The move props up the company's yield to just more than 3%. Your bank may not even be giving you that kind of return on your idle cash balance!

Subscribers to the Income Investor newsletter can appreciate the companies sending more and more money to their investors. The newsletter singles out companies that are committed to growing their distributions with market-thumping results.

Want to see what's being recommended these days? Go ahead and give the newsletter service a shot with a 30-day trial subscription. Who knows? Maybe the next thing that will get hiked will be your interest.

Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz pays attention to yield signs. He does not own shares in any of the companies in this story. He is also part of theRule Breakersnewsletter research team, seeking out tomorrow's ultimate growth stocks a day early.The Fool has a disclosure policy.