What Are The Highest Quality Dividend Growth Stocks?

About a year ago, I was surprised when I published an article on high-quality dividend growth stocks, and it went on to receive the most page views of anything I have ever published on Seeking Alpha.
This is a new version of that article.
Many dividend growth investors try to stick to really high-quality stocks. They prize quality as much as yield, dividend growth rate, and valuation when they are selecting stocks.
There are nearly infinite ways to define quality, of course, but many investors utilize independent gauges of quality as part of their process.
In this article, I employ five widely used quality indicators:
Value Line's Safety Rank Value Line's Financial Strength rating Morningstar's Moat rating S&P Credit ratings Simply Safe Dividends’ Dividend Safety scores The last factor is new this year. Last year I displayed Simply Safe Dividends’ scores, but I did not use them in the ratings. In the ensuing 12 months, I have come to see them as quality indicators in their own right, and so this year I added them to the scoring factors.
I applied the five quality indicators to stocks in the Dividend Champions, Contenders, and Challengers document [CCC], which requires five straight years of increasing dividend payouts for a stock to be listed. (Since last year’s article, David Fish, the CCC’s originator, passed away. Happily for all of us, Justin Law has picked up the mantle and now publishes the CCC monthly.)
You will find descriptions of the... Read more