Dividend Investing Can Be Boring
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As I was sitting her thinking what to write, it dawned on me that if I was writing about small-caps or oil stocks then there would be constantly something to write about – this small company did this and its stock skyrocketed (or tanked), oil stocks shot up 5% as OPEC cut production. With dividend investing, sometime there is nothing to write about – but that is ok with me.
One of the things I like best about dividend investing is that the stocks that I typically hold in my portfolio are the big, established companies that have a habit of going up over the long term. Yes, I do keep track of my holdings and watch for big changes in company direction or huge slip ups in terms of performance, but more often than not I do nothing and continue to hold the stock. Case in point, Merck and BCE, which I sold pretty much at their 52 week lows only to see them shoot up in price. Given, these stocks have not raised their dividends and therefore no longer fit my investment criteria, but I would be sitting on some huge gains if I did nothing.
So, the moral of the story here is that it is ok with me that dividend investing can be pretty boring from time to time. The excitement comes during times when 1 year goes buy and a company has raised its dividend and I realize that I am now receiving a larger return on my investment than I did previously. That is fun.
5 Comments on this post
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hejustlaughs said:
I find it exciting watching the dividends roll in and being automatically reinvested to buy even more shares. It’s like your shares bearing children.
May 30th, 2007 at 1:34 am -
MT said:
I notice you have quite a good number of stocks from US, how do Canadians handles the tax amount withholded by US (15%) on dividends, do we get that back from Canadian Taxes?
May 30th, 2007 at 6:19 am -
MM said:
I like stocks that raise dividnds every yeaer, but you should nto have sold Merck. I had Merck for 10 years and was break even after its big fall.
Sometimes dividend players have problems and have to stop raising for awhile, but that does not mean you should give up on such a big cash generator like Merck.
Good luck.
May 31st, 2007 at 6:54 pm -
Deborah said:
Isn’t there still evaluating the quality of a dividend stock to write about?
I’ve been interested in this topic and someone I knew sent me a link to a site with dividend stocks and it had these huge projections for earnings. I didn’t really find any information on how they came up with their numbers, but came up with some numbers based on a highly simplistic model to get ideas which ones to check out first.
So, then a week or so later I went back to start checking out a couple of the stocks and there was more information about how the list was compiled, and how utterly dumb. To me, it was the way to guarantee that you’d buy a stock with the most run up recently, which to me is also a way to ensure you missed the a run up.
Anyway, I looked closer at the top two picks from the site and yuck.
I write about investments on my blog as well.
June 10th, 2007 at 8:48 pm
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