10 Stocks With the Largest Dividends in the World

Dividends are an amazing thing. All you have to do is invest in a company, and sit on your hands while the checks roll in. For people looking for income, higher-yield -- dividend yield is the percentage of the stock price you earn in dividends -- stocks have proven a god-send over the past decade, with bond yields spending much of the period near historical lows following the rate cuts during the Global Financial Crisis. 

Yet at the very same time, plenty of investors have gotten burned, making the mistake of buying a stock based on the yield they expected to get, only for the company to cut -- and in some cases actually eliminate -- the dividend. Adding further injury, a share price drop often accompanies the dividend cut, leaving you with a big loss too. 

After filtering out the smallest stocks, starting with companies worth at least $1 billion, here are 10 stocks that offer investors some of the highest yields in the world; all pay double-digit rates based on recent share prices and dividend amounts. But several of them have questionable abilities to maintain the current payouts, and their high yields aren’t the product of raising the dividend, but sharp drops in their stock prices. Keep reading to learn more.