2011 Was A Great Year For Dividend Stocks

Investing in dividend growth stocks is a long-term proposition. One of the beauties of following a dividend growth strategy is that you don't have to watch your portfolio or the market on a daily basis. For the most part, daily, monthly and yearly movements are just noise in the system. My normal practice is to refresh my analytical spreadsheets each Friday with updated price information on the 210+ stocks that I follow. Even then, I don't normally look at the value of my portfolio or the performance of individual stocks. However, each quarter I update my income portfolio's performance and benchmark it against the S&P 500 and other portfolios. At that time I will look at performance of individual stocks to understand the overall performance the portfolio. Saturday, I updated my Income Portfolio's performance for the fourth quarter. Building on that, here are my Dividend Growth Portfolio's top and bottom... Read more