Widely recognized by its AFLAC duck brand icon, this health and life insurance provider has, like most financials, recently seen its stock (AFL: 52.47 0.00%, yld: 2.13%) badly beaten down in the market on fears of “toxic” assets exposure - in this case hybrid securities issued by European financial institutions - and associated ratings downgrades. [...]
BusinessWeek has just created a slide show of the U.S. companies with the safest dividends, based on picks they collected from portfolio managers and other investing experts. Below are my quick takes on all the picks that offer a greater than 2% yield (the stars represent Dividendinvestor.com’s star ranking system - three stars are five [...]
It’s sometimes difficult explaining to people just how important a role dividend growth and dividend reinvestment can play in successful investing. So I went looking for tools that might help potential dividend growth investors see this for themselves, and came up with two online dividend growth calculators and a dollar-cost averaging (DCA) spreadsheet aimed at [...]
SmartMoney has come out with a list of dividend stocks with 5% dividend yields you can believe in. The list includes such names as Consolidated Edison, Eli Lilly, Genuine Parts Co., Heinz, Pitney Bowes and Verizon - several of which I’m actively following.
However, I’m not buying any of them yet. Here are my quick [...]
In the previous post I made note of Robert Shiller’s P/E10 cyclically adjusted price earnings ratio, a valuation method that smooths out earnings fluctuations to help provide a better picture of the market’s value. Now I’ve found an online stock return predictor calculator that takes P/E10 a step further by using it to predict S&P [...]
When investing in a market like this - where every trading day seems to be just another opportunity for the market to sell off - it pays to keep a long-term perspective. That’s why historical gauges of stock market valuation like Robert J. Shiller’s cyclically adjusted price earnings (CAPE) ratio are so useful.
Designed to smooth [...]
As the market continues to fall, those investors who are taking the opportunity to buy are likely to be amply rewarded in the years ahead. That’s the reminder from Larry MacDonald of Canadian Business, who recently offered the following quote from William Bernstein’s book The Four Pillars of Investing:
The rewards of fishing in such troubled [...]
While surveying the investing landscape for worthwhile dividend investments I seem to keep running across certain names more than others. One of those is the 3M Company (MMM: 81.56 0.00%, yld: 2.52%) - a self-described diversified technology company with businesses in everything from materials and manufacturing to electronics and health care.
But, most important to me, [...]
A list of 10 dividend stocks with 50+ years of consecutive increases has been compiled by Dividends Value. It includes such recognizable names as Procter & Gamble (PG: 63.01 0.00%, yld: 2.79%) and 3M (MMM: 81.56 0.00%, yld: 2.52%), as well as some that are less familiar like Dover Corp. (DOV: 46.33 0.00%, yld: [...]
Standard & Poor’s senior index analyst Howard Silverblatt still believes in dividends. However, in a recent S&P video commentary he notes that in the current environment - in which dividend cutting has become acceptable - finding stocks with reasonably safe dividends isn’t easy.
But, he says, they’re out there.
To help investors navigate through the current dividend [...]
