Should Dividend Growth Investors Disregard Dividend Freezes From the 2008-09 Crisis?

Like any strategy, investing for income via dividend growth requires discipline. Set up some guidelines that make sense for your goals, skills, risk tolerance and so forth. Then learn and improve, expanding what works and refining or rejecting what doesn't. Sure, you might also invest in other assets, using other strategies and approaches. But if you're willing to invest in just about anything you don't have a strategy, you have a compulsion. Following a strategy means you miss opportunities that fall outside your chosen approach, just like the flinty value investors who missed boatloads of bucks passing up Google (GOOG). But they don't seem to mind off-strategy misses and neither should you. Strategy is as much a discipline of exclusion as a focus on inclusion. Ask Warren Buffett how he handles stocks outside his “circle of competence” when he invests for Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-B). He ignores them. One common guideline... Read more