According to a recent article in The New York Times, the inflation-adjusted S&P 500 has never seen a 10-year period as bad as the one that ended last month. Even after reinvesting the dividends, S&P 500 investors would have ended up losing about 5.1% a year – worse than the 4.3% compounded annual loss in [...]
SmartMoney has just come out with its picks of 5 Dividend Stocks for This Market. The five picks – British Petroleum [[BP]], Altria Group [[MO]], Vodafone Group [[VOD]], PPG Industries [[PPG]] and Bristol-Myers Squibb [[BMY]] – were all chosen based on “a steady history of increasing their dividends, solid balance sheets and good prospects to [...]
A couple of years ago analysts were falling all over themselves recommending General Electric [[GE]] – the quintessential ultra-conservative blue-chip dividend payer. I recall one money manager on Consuelo Mack WealthTrack recommending it as the “one investment” that everyone should have in their portfolio, with words to the effect that it was a great buy [...]
Two of the sillier expressions I’ve heard a lot lately are “This is a trader’s market, not an investor’s market” and “Buy and hold is dead.” To anyone with purely a trader’s mindset these sentiments are undoubtedly appealing (and, I might add, self serving), but it’s clear that those making such statements don’t understand the [...]
The secret to long-term returns is … dividends. That’s the reminder today from Raymond James’ Chief Investment Strategist Jeffrey Saut, who, in a post on the company’s Investment Strategy page, also cautioned market participants not to get too bearish. Saut notes that, since 1926, dividends have accounted for 4.5% of the market’s average total annualized [...]
