Archive for February, 2009

AFLAC: Ugly duckling stock, but dividend swan?

Widely recognized by its AFLAC duck brand icon, this health and life insurance provider has, like most financials, recently seen its stock (AFL: 50.63 +1.22%, yld: 2.24%) 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: The U.S. companies with the safest dividends

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 [...]

Three useful dividend growth and reinvestment calculators

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’s 5%+ dividend stocks you can believe in

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 [...]

Online stock returns predictor based on Shiller’s P/E10

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 [...]