The History Of 50 Dividend Aristocrats And What It Means For Your Retirement

I analyze the dividend growth rates and standard deviations of 50 Dividend Aristocrats.
I take a deep dive at how it can impact retirement for dividend investors and what can be done.
Several well held dividend investing beliefs are put to the test.
Written by Sam Kovacs
Introduction: we need more research on dividends!
During the past few months, I’ve been formalizing our approach to dividend investing. This has been fascinating, as it has forced me to go from broad assumptions we’ve made from observing markets, to backing it up with data.
With the technology we’ve developed at mad-dividends.com, Robert & I now have privileged access to a wealth of information on US equities. But if we do not leverage this information, it remains just boring data entries in a massive database.
By making diverse calculations on this data, we can make it reveal the stories which have remained obscure to dividend investors for decades. I’ve been down the rabbit hole and back making calculations and testing different assumptions.
These deep dives usually end up in me staring at my excel sheets for hours on end, isolating myself until I get to the bottom of it. Many times, I find that my efforts lead to dead ends, while other times, they provide valuable insights.

Source: Open Domain
Have you ever wondered why so much time has been spent analyzing the mean and standard deviations of stock market returns, yet no such work has been done analyzing dividend growth?
The answer of course, is because most academics don’t understand the value of dividends. They will tell you that you should be indifferent between a stock that pays dividends and one that doesn’t, because you can always just sell a fixed amount of your stock to create an artificial dividend.
The theory of the irrelevance of dividends was introduced by Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller in 1961. Like much of the academic research produced by proponents of the efficient... Read more