10 Defensive Healthcare Dividend Plays

Some bullish relief in the latest downturn has finally come this week. The Dow is well above 11,000 again. It seems as if people are potentially excited about further quantitative easing from Mr. Bernanke and improving numbers. Whether or not this will happen is pure speculation, but the market is still significantly depressed from its highs in July. It should be (in light of data hinting at a higher chance of recession) but how much? Asset managers are still worried about risky stocks, and they haven't been piling back in (yet). Looking at volume data from the August crash, there was quite a significant spike during the selling. In addition, the Dow Jones is trading in an increasingly narrow range, going up and down over the 11,000 line and approaching the line steadily. This signals... more

Sector By Sector Model Portfolio With Double The Market Yield

Over the past few weeks I've screened the ten economic sectors of the 1500 stock universe that is formed from the stocks in the S&P 500, the Mid-Cap 400 and Small Cap 600. It was my intention in writing a sector by sector analysis to not only examine each sector to identify possible equity selections, but to also highlight the ability to build a well-balanced and diversified portfolio to include all fully weighted economic sectors. Dividend investing to many investors means a portfolio packed with telephone and utility stocks. As we found, there are plenty of selections in each sector. Many investors largest asset account is their IRA, so I have not added MLP's to the mix of our choice of a dividend growth portfolio. A plan B, so to speak. There is often a question why we should diversify... more

Dividend Watchdog: How Safe Are These 5 Yields?

Dividends are a major reason for some investors putting their money into equities. But what if the capital is eroded by share price falls? Here we look at 5 stocks that pay great dividends, and discuss how safe the shares are at current levels: ... more

Dividend Report Card: Johnson & Johnson

The Dividend Report Card wasn't designed as a buy or sell signal, but rather as a tool to gauge the health of a company's dividend. For a full explanation of each category, click here for a tutorial. Today's pupil is Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) , which posts a 3.6% yield. When we last looked at the company in early March, it scored an A, so let's see if it can retain that top score.... more

2 Grocery Store Dividends to Buy and 1 to Avoid

Grocers often have relatively stable cash flow and many even pay out a quarterly dividend to shareholders. On the flip side, grocery stores also operate on razor-thin margins and have to be very careful when passing along price increases to their customers, as loyalty in this sector comes with a high price tag. After perusing the sector, two grocers stood out from the pack as safe choices to grow their dividends over time, while another grocer which appears safe on paper could have a hole at the bottom of its bag. Kroger (NYSE: KR) -- trust it Kroger, the parent company behind such chains as Fred Meyer, QFC, Ralphs, and Food 4 Less, is staring rising food costs directly in the eye and coming out victorious.... more

Don’t Hold Your Breath for Dividends From These Tech Giants

Tech companies are sitting on piles of cash that would make Scrooge McDuck from DuckTales envious. But they aren't putting it to work to hire workers, buy equipment, or pay shareholders. Isn't it their responsibility to do something with the cash?
One explanation is that companies like Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) and Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) are holding most of their cash overseas. At the end of the first quarter, these companies had $42 billion, $40.2 billion, and $38.8 billion in foreign cash on hand respectively. Bringing that home would create a big tax hit. But there’s another factor that will keep these companies from paying investors back, at least in the form of dividends, anytime soon: stock options.... more

This Millennium's 10 Best Dividend Stocks

By examining the top performers of the last 11 years, I want to find traits that the top performers of the 2010s should also have. I sought stocks with a market cap greater than $1 billion and steady annual dividend payments, and I excluded royalty trusts or master limited partnerships, which are taxed differently. Here's what I found:
Rank Company Name Return Since Millennium Current Yield
1 HollyFrontier (NYSE: HFC) 5,016.3% 0.9%
2 Raven Industries (Nasdaq: RAVN) 2,815.6% 1.4%
3 Precision Castparts (PCP) 2,260.9% 0.1%
4 Southern Copper (NYSE: SCCO) 2,252.6% 8%... more

14 Large Caps With Rapid Dividend Growth And Strong Dividend Coverage

When evaluating dividend stocks, it is important to take into account cash coverage of dividend payments. If a company has plenty of operating cash flow to cover its dividend payments, it is more likely to continue paying its dividend yield. We ran a screen on large-cap dividend stocks seeing rapid dividend growth year-over-year. We screened these stocks for those with at least three times the trailing-twelve-month operating cash flow per share compared to its TTM dividend per share.
Do you think these companies pay reliable dividends? Use this list as a starting-off point for your own analysis. List sorted by dividend yield. 1. China Petroleum & Chemical Corp. (SNP): Independent Oil & Gas Industry. Market... more

Profitable Semiconductors With The Highest Dividend Yields

With the recent market drop, it may be the time to invest in quality companies that are now paying a higher yield. I have had a focus on utilities and have now finished my review. Next I moved to semiconductors, as I have been following Intel (INTC) and others. My review of Semiconductors led me to go long Intel today. I shorted September 19 puts (and wrote about it in an article you can read here). I hope this list is of as much value to you as it has been to me. I setup an EDGAR online screener to find semiconductors that pay a dividend. I don't want to look at all the stocks that pay a dividend, so I filtered the results based on the following: Must trade at least 500K shares a.... more

5 Stocks With Rising Dividends And Falling Payout Ratios, Undervalued By Graham

One helpful way to find potentially undervalued opportunities is from the “godfather of value investing” himself, Benjamin Graham. Graham created an equation to calculate the maximum fair value for a stock, referred to as the Graham Number. Any stock trading at a significant discount to this number would appear undervalued. The Graham Number only requires two data points: current earnings per share and current book value per share. The Graham Number = Square Root of (22.5) x (TTM Earnings per Share) x (MRQ Book Value per Share). This equation assumes that a stock is overvalued if P/E is over 15 or P/BV is over 1.5. We used the Graham Number to screen for potentially undervalued stocks among the universe of dividend stocks seeing rising dividends year-over-year with falling payout... more