Stockpickr!’s Top 10 Dividend Increases

If you are unfamilair with the Stockpickr! concept, it is a stock recommendation site that allows users to enter a list of stocks that meet their criteria that you can then received as personal recommendations. You enter your favorite stocks and you receive recommendations based on what other hedge funds, mutual funds, and other peer portfolios are buying. It is a neat site to surf around on. However, I see it as nothing more that a way to generate ideas for investment, and not “recommendations” to buy stock. I am not really sure where the data comes from or how their algorith works, but it is interesting to see the results nonetheless.

Of course, my interest in the site always leads me to the dividend stocks. One portfolio that caught my attention today was the Top 10 Dividend Increases for the Week. This list of stocks describes itself as a:

…list of stocks with the highest increases in dividends for the week ending August 25, 2007. Shown is the percentage increase in dividend over the previous periodic dividend

As an investor, one of the most difficult things to do is to constantly generate ideas for further review. It always seems that we focus in on the tried and true dividend gorwth stocks such as Coca-Cola, Procter and Gamble, or Wal-Mart. Seeing other stocks that are aggressively raising their dividends is both interesting and worthwhile as you never know when you will find that one stock that the market may have forgotten about or has ignored to this point.

The list of stocks presented in this weeks list is a hodge-podge of different companies, with two Canadian banks showing up which I am happy to see (Disclosure – I own Royal Bank). Here is the list of stocks and their associated dividend increases:

Company	Dividend Increase
AMER WOODMARK CP	50%
BHP BILLITON LIMI	46%
GK SVCS INC CL A	25%
ATRION CP	20%
WACHOVIA CP	14%
ROYAL BANK OF CAN	9%
PIONEER NATURAL R	8%
TORONTO DOMINION	7.5%
REALTY INCOME CP	6.1%
MAINSOURCE FIN GR	5%

Again, don’t use these lists as buy recommendations – use them as a source of investment ideas that you can dive into with further research. In addition, just because a company recetnly jacked up its dividend does not mean that it is a good investment. The key is to find companies that consistently and regularily increase their dividends.