Over the last few months I’ve mostly written about high yield stocks and the occasional high-profile disaster. That sort of thing isn’t to everyone’s taste, so this month I’ll be looking at something completely different. More specifically, I’ll be looking at four high growth “dividend champions”, companies that have grown quickly whilst raising their dividend…
Very few stocks ever have a dividend yield of 15% or more, and if they do then the dividend has probably already been cut or suspended. For example, if I sort my watch list of dividend-paying stocks by yield, I get Provident Financial and Capita at the top, with yields of 20% and 17% respectively.…
For many dividend investors, the demise of Carillion was a disaster. Not only did their portfolios lose an important source of income, they also saw a permanent loss of capital. It’s easy to see what went wrong with hindsight, and in the August 2017 issue of Master Investor I wrote about some of the key…
As a UK investor I am mostly interested in UK stocks. However, Master Investor’s focus last month on the US prompted me to look across the pond. Specifically, I wanted to see how some of the biggest and safest dividend payers in the US stacked up as long-term dividend investments. To be honest, I wasn’t…
Every now and then I like to take a look at the highest yielding stocks in the market. Not to buy them of course, because the dividend yield on its own is a crude tool at the best of times. Instead, I’m interested in finding out which companies have crashed and burned, and what lessons…
As dividend stocks go, life insurance companies have a mixed track record. On the one hand, they operate in a sector which is relatively immune to the economic cycle (people don’t typically cancel their life insurance just because there’s a recession). On the other hand, dividend cuts are fairly common within the sector, despite its…
Following its demerger from Tarmac Group in 1999, Carillion has given its shareholders fantastic returns year after year. Perhaps the best example of this is its dividend, which grew every single year, going from 2.7p in 1999 to 18.4p in 2016. That’s equivalent to a growth rate of 12% per year, every year, for 17…
AstraZeneca (LON:AZN) and GlaxoSmithKline (LON:GSK) are the two pharmaceutical giants of the FTSE 100. They are also both high yield dividend stocks with yields of more than 4%. Another notable fact is that both companies have been long-term holdings of a certain Mr Neil Woodford. But no more. Following a 15-year holding period, Woodford sold…
Over the last two of month’s I’ve outlined a series of ten questions which I use to help me avoid yield traps. This month I’m going to interrogate a company using those questions so that you can see them being used in a practical setting. The company in question is KCOM Group (LON:KCOM), a FTSE…
As a dividend-focused investor I’m always on the lookout for high yield shares, whether that yield is high relative to the market average or high relative to the company’s peers. However, as most yield-seeking investors soon discover, high yield stocks do not always deliver the yield you were hoping for. That’s because dividends can be…
