4 Dividend Stocks Showing You the Money

Some of the market's better performers are easing up on their purse strings, sending more money out to their shareholders. Readers of the Income Investor newsletter can certainly appreciate that kind of thinking. Let's take a closer look at four of the companies that inched their payouts higher this past week. Let's start with Cognex (Nasdaq: CGNX). The maker of barcode readers and other machine vision systems is juicing up its quarterly distributions by 13% to $0.09 a share. This is the third time over the past year that Cognex has jacked up its rate. You don't need a barcode scanner to see where this welcome trend is heading. PepsiCo (NYSE: PEP) is also fizzing up its disbursements. The soda and salty snack giant is boosting its quarterly dividend by 7% to $0.515 a share. PepsiCo shareholders should be used to this by now. PepsiCo has come through with 39 consecutive years of hikes. Another company making tracks is CSX (NYSE: CSX) . The railroad operator's new quarterly payouts are chugging 38% higher to $0.36 a share. That's not the only station that CSX is hitting on its way to returning more money to its shareowners. CSX also announced a $2 billion share buyback. Finally, we have Legg Mason (NYSE: LM) legging it out. The mutual fund operator doubled its quarterly distributions to $0.08 a share. Legg Mason's move came even though assets under management dipped slightly over the past year.... Read more