Dividend Champions Smackdown IX

In previous installments of the Smackdown series, I screened the Dividend Champions list of companies that have paid higher dividends for at least 25 straight years (which can be found here) using factors such as yield, payout ratio, and dividend growth rates (which was the focus of Smackdown VIII). I generally only do one Smackdown each month, shortly after updating the Dividend Champions spreadsheet, but I was intrigued by some of the recent comments on articles by myself and other authors to the effect that we always seem to come up with the same companies, as deserving as they may be. Some people also mentioned a desire to consider both small cap and mid cap companies, which makes sense, from the perspective of gaining some additional diversification. Although definitions vary small caps are generally described as having a market capitalization (stock price times shares outstanding) between $100 million and $2 billion, whereas mid caps range in size from $2 billion to $10 billion in market capitalization. Since I had just reformatted the market cap column to be sortable, I decided to run a dual Smackdown and screened as follows:... Read more