No. of Recommendations: 18
A side comment on the general topic of dividends...
Personally I find it very difficult to pick individual stocks which pay a decent yield. The temptation is to look for high yields, which is always a bit too strongly correlated with seeking companies having trouble.
So to garner a dividend from a portfolio I prefer a shotgun approach.
Random example:
Since most readers here are in the US and non-US dividends are a nuisance for them, find all the US-domiciled stocks in the Value Line 1700 database.
Of those, find all the stocks ones with dividend yields in the rage 1-8%. Too low and it doesn't really help with the yield of the portfolio; too high and the companies are in too much trouble. The numbers aren't that critical. You could use 0.5% to 10%, but 1-8 seems fine. That leaves you with an average of around 725 stocks.
From among those dividend payers, simply buy equal dollar amounts of the N stocks with the highest reported return on shareholders' equity, with N = whatever number of stocks you want to own. Hold those stocks for a quarter (or six months or a year or whatever) and repeat. I tested N=40 stocks.
This would actually have beat the S&P 500 modestly over time, but it's basically a tie so it isn't a way to get rich. It does however generate a yield higher than the S&P with pretty low risk. No company is more than 2.5% of your money, so you don't have to look too closely at them. At the moment that would give an average dividend yield of about 2.89%. Their average earnings yield is about 7.1%, equating to a P/E of 14.1 and a dividend payout ratio of 41%.
Still not enough yield? From among those 40 by ROE, take only the 30 highest yielders, which historically hurts the long run total return by a fraction of a percent but is still basically market tracking or trivially beating. Currently that would give an average yield of 3.40%, each stock being a high ROE business at 3.33% of your dividend portfolio. The average earnings yield equates to a P/E of 14.2.
Jim
