Meet the 2022 Dogs of the Dow

Many investors are struggling to get income from their investment portfolios right now. Yields on bonds and bank CDs are still at rock-bottom levels, and that's forcing plenty of people into the stock market. Yet even many dividend-paying stocks don't offer the yields that investors want to see, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI -1.36%) offering an average of just 2.2%.

There's one strategy, though, that looks to capture the opportunities available in blue-chip dividend stocks . The Dogs of the Dow framework is a simple way to get higher dividend yields from your portfolio. It doesn't always outperform the average -- indeed, it underperformed in 2021 -- but it has a solid long-term track record that appeals to many income investors. Below, you'll see the 10 stocks that make up the Dogs of the Dow for 2022.

The 2022 Dogs of the Dow

Source: DogsoftheDow.com.

How the Dogs work

Few strategies are easier than the Dogs of the Dow in terms of implementation. On the last trading day of the year, you take the dividend yields of all 30 Dow stocks. From there, put the stocks in order and take the 10 highest-yielding ones. Then, buy equal dollar amounts of all 10 stocks and keep them in your portfolio throughout the following year. That's all you have to do until the end of the following year, when you repeat the process.

Over the course of 2021, there wasn't much change in the stocks that pay the best dividends in the Dow. As a result, although the order of the stocks was different, there was only one replacement, as Intel took the place of Cisco Systems (CSCO -0.97%).

Image source: Getty Images.

A second chance for the Dogs in 2022?

The Dogs of the Dow strategy works best when the market focuses on value investing principles. Because most Dow stocks have stable dividends, they tend to move toward the top of the Dogs list when some short-term event causes their share prices to fall. If that's merely a short-term issue, then the stock often rises over the course of the year, outperforming the broader average and then making way for a new hard-hit stock to take its place.

You could see this dynamic play out with Cisco, Chevron, and Walgreens. Despite supply chain issues, Cisco benefited from strong demand for network equipment, and it sees growth picking back up in the near future. Rising oil prices during 2021 helped Chevron rise, while Walgreens bounced back from adversity to benefit from people needing health services.

However, other stocks failed to deliver. Verizon was the poorest performer in the Dow, as investors foresaw slowing growth despite the ongoing rollout of 5G technology. Losses for Merck and Amgen showed the have vs. have-not dynamic going on in healthcare, and tepid performances from most of the other 2021 Dogs of the Dow led the strategy to underperformance of roughly eight percentage points.

Will the fourth time be the charm in 2022?

2021's underperformance marked the third straight year of the Dogs losing to the broader Dow. Again, that largely reflects investors' distaste for value investing in favor of stocks with higher potential for fast growth.

These cycles aren't unprecedented, though, and in the past, they've often led to future outperformance from the Dogs. Given the heightened uncertainty in the markets lately, the more defensive names that often make the Dogs list could well finally start to stand out in 2022.

The average yield for the 2022 Dogs of the Dow is 3.9%, and while that's hardly a huge amount of income, it's better than you'll find from the majority of stocks in the market today. Income investors should consider whether the Dogs of the Dow could be the answer they've looked for in order to generate more cash from their investments.