5 Safe And Cheap Dividend Stocks To Invest (March 2020)

This article is part of our monthly series, where we highlight five companies that are large-cap, relatively safe, dividend-paying, and also are offering large discounts to their historical norms.
It's always a good idea to keep your wish-list ready by separating the wheat from the chaff.
We go over the filtering process to select just five such stocks from more than 7,500 companies that are traded on U.S. exchanges, including OTC networks. This month, the selected five companies, as a group, would offer an average of 41% more dividends compared to two years ago.
Markets have been very volatile in the last two weeks due to a very high degree of economic uncertainty and fear emanating from the spread of Covid-19 Coronavirus beyond the borders of China. Even though the number of new coronavirus infections are coming down in China, but have been rising in many other countries, including the US. The broader market, as represented by the S&P 500 index, dropped 13% in a matter of a few days. However, the markets got some reprieve this past Monday. On Tuesday, the Feds surprised the markets by a 50-basis point cut in interest rates, a move that was sudden and probably more than expected. The future direction of the markets remains uncertain as it is still anyone’s guess what will be the real impact from coronavirus. If nothing else, markets will remain on edge, and volatility is likely to remain high for the next month or so.

S&P 500 ETF (SPY) six-month chart, courtesy Yahoo Finance
Fortunately, as long-term dividend investors, we need not pay too much attention to the short-term or day-to-day movements of the market. We need to pay attention to the quality of companies that we buy and buy them when they are being offered relatively cheap. The goal of this series of articles is to find companies that are fundamentally strong, carry low debts, support reasonable, sustainable and growing dividend yields, and also trading at relatively low or... Read more