Millions of investors rely on their portfolios to help provide them with enough income to make ends meet. Given how low interest rates on bonds and other fixed-income products have gotten lately, more investors are turning to dividend-paying stocks to make up the shortfall in their overall income.
When you're hungry for income, it's tempting to grab up the highest-yielding stocks you can find. But among U.S. companies, you can often do better by sticking with yields that are slightly lower, if you can also identify stocks that will keep delivering the dividend goods year after year after year. Later in this article, I'll share some of those stocks, but first, let's look at why you don't always do best taking the high-yield road.
Deferring gratification
Morgan Stanley recently did a survey that divided U.S. dividend-paying stocks into five equally sized groups. The stocks with the highest yields went into the first group, the next-highest-yielding stocks went into the second group, and so on down to the lowest-yielding stocks in the fifth group. The company then compared performance among the groups.
What Morgan Stanley found was that unlike in other countries, U.S. stocks that had the highest yields didn't have the best performance. Rather, it was the second highest yielding group that put in top returns.
Anecdotally, one possible explanation may be that often, high-yielding stocks are set up for a fall, typically falling sharply right before a dividend cut that brings the stock's yield back down to earth. By contrast, less aggressive payouts are more sustainable and allow the stocks that pay them to have a better chance at growth and capital appreciation as well as healthy payouts.
Five prospects for your portfolio
To come up with some good ideas for further research, I looked at dividend stocks yielding between 2% and 4% that have delivered 10% dividend growth over the past one, three, five, and 10 years.
The resulting companies were quite varied, both in past performance and in industry focus. Among the top performers over the past five years were Union Pacific
Yet not all dividend payers have had an easy time lately. Walgreen
Meanwhile, solidly in the middle of the road from a performance standpoint are Intel
Similarly, Cliffs was on top of the world for a long time when its coal and iron ore resources were in demand. The coal-killing factor of low natural-gas prices and falling demand for steel production in China, however, have hit Cliffs hard, and it isn't entirely clear when prices will recover. But that didn't stop Cliffs from instituting a new dividend policy that resulted in a whopping 123% jump in its payout.
Be smart
No stock is a sure thing, so if you're looking at dividend stocks as a substitute for bonds, look again. But if you're willing to take on the greater risk that stocks entail, you can get a nice kicker on your income. These stocks have stood the test of time and should continue to provide healthy payouts for the foreseeable future.
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