What a quarter it was on the Dow Jones Industrials Average
The past three months have been a serious roller coaster ride. The Dow took off its rose-colored glasses from the first quarter and crashed through all of May, falling below its opening price for the year. Then the index whipsawed higher through June to bring us just shy of 13,000 points yet again. So how did it do it?
It was a tug-of-war all the way through between volatile and cyclical stocks, and steady-eddy big domestic dividends. Though we still closed the quarter down, it would have been much worse if not for a few strong performances.
On the hero column we have the two highest dividend yielders on the index, AT&T and Verizon
Wal-Mart
The anchors on the index included Caterpillar
Cicsco has been nailed by weak business spending in Europe, and JPMorgan has become a Wall-Street dunce after its enormous, and growing, $2 billion trading loss.
It's quarters like this that demonstrate how valuable great dividend stocks are in long-term wealth building. But a great dividend is characterized by more than a high yield alone. That's why JPMorgan didn't make our list of "The 3 Dow Stocks Dividend Investors Need."
After taking an in-depth look at all 30 Dow components, though, I'm confident that these three are essentials for any long-term investor. Read more about these top three stocks that you can buy today.