The Tweedy, Browne Worldwide High Dividend Yield Value Fund and It’s Holdings

There are a lot of different funds out there that focus on high yield dividend stocks. Not all of them are good and a lot of them charge very high management fees for the “privilege” of investing in them. One fund that doesn’t charge a super high expense ratio is the Tweedy, Browne Worldwide High Dividend Yield Value Fund. The MER is not low at 1.53%, compared to Vanguard’s funds. However, my purpose here is to not suggest investing in this fund. Instead, my purpose is to see what this fund is holding as high dividend yield stocks in order to learn something.

The Fund’s Purpose

Everything that goes into your portfolio must have a purpose. It can be growth, income, or safety, but it must have a purpose. When I look at companies held by a mutual fund to identify stocks to analyze myself, I start by checking out the fund’s purpose statement to ensure it’s goals fit my own. Here is the purpose of the Tweedy fund:

The Tweedy, Browne Worldwide High Dividend Yield Value Fund seeks long-term growth of capital by investing in companies around the globe that the Adviser believes to have above-average dividend yields, an established history of paying dividends and reasonable valuations.

The Fund’s Top 10 Holdings

Based on the above purpose statement, the following stocks made it past Tweedy’s analysis stage and have become a top 10 holding in the fund’s assets, as of February 29, 2008. These stocks, according to them, have above-average dividend yields, an established history of paying dividends and reasonable valuations – something that I definitely look for when making my own investment decisions.

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This is a very interesting list of stocks. It is much more international than I thought it would be. If you look at the Country allocation of the fund, you can see that over 15% of the funds assets are in the UK. This may be because of their views on the US markets right now. Nonetheless, it is awesome to see such diversification of assets.

What To Do With This List

My purpose of looking at list such as this is to identify stocks that may fit into my own portfolio. With this fund in particular, there are few that I would look into however I invest my global assets through index funds. The fund has put a large weighting on GE, which may be something to think about.