Blog Archives - The Dividend Guy Blog

Royal Bank vs National Bank: How to Pick When Both Stocks Are Great

A member asked me this during a private webinar at Dividend Stocks Rock, and I have not stopped thinking about it since. I know how to compare two stocks. I know how to look at metrics. But how do I pick the right company when the two companies I am looking at are both amazing? That is a better question than it sounds. Most investing content teaches you to tell a good company from a bad one. Almost nobody tells you what to do when both pass every test you know how to run. So I picked the …

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Economic Moats: The 7 Types and 4 Stocks I Own

Blog, Dividend stocks

Four companies. Four moats. Four businesses a competitor cannot copy with a bigger budget. Alphabet, Costco, Visa and Microsoft all sit inside my top 10 holdings. None of them earned that spot with a hot quarter. Each one earned it because something protects its profits from the rest of the world. Morningstar calls that protection an economic moat. I call it the reason I can hold a stock through two bad years and still sleep at night. There are seven moats worth knowing. Here they are, …

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Portfolio Makeover: What to Do When Your Returns Lag the Market

Blog, Investing Strategy

The market is up. Your portfolio is not. A few bad picks, a couple of losers you cannot shake, and the nagging sense that everyone else is at a party you missed. So you start wondering whether it is time to blow it up and start over. Before you scrap half your holdings and chase a fresh list of winners, let me offer a different read. When someone tells me their portfolio needs a makeover, I do not hear a bad investor. I hear a missing strategy. The last six months are close to irrelevant. …

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Telus Stock: Can an 11% Dividend Turn This Story Around?

Blog, Stock Analysis

On December 3rd, 2025, Telus froze its dividend growth. Seven months later, the stock sits near a decade low, and the yield has climbed above 11%. That number looks like a gift. It is closer to a warning. If you still hold Telus (T.TO), you are probably nursing a hangover. Since the freeze, the stock is down about 11% including the dividend, while the broad Canadian market (XIU) is up 13.5%. That is a gap of more than 20 percentage points in seven months. So let me revisit the story, look …

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2 Stocks on My Buy List: Northrop Grumman and CCL Industries

Blog, Dividend stocks

Since January, the market has paid up for a short list of winners and walked past a lot of good businesses. That gap is where I went looking this week. Both stocks in this piece came off the same screen: a DSR PRO rating of at least 4, a Dividend Safety score of at least 4, and a price under 21 times earnings. In a market where almost everything looks expensive, buying a quality business for less than 20 times earnings feels rare. One is an American defense giant that fell 35% this year. …

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Economic Moats: How Switching Costs and Network Effects Protect Your Dividend

Blog, Stock Analysis

This is the second of two articles on economic moats. The first part covered intangible assets, cost advantages, and scale. We now cover the other two sources, the ones that are hardest to break once they take hold: switching costs and the network effect. Same reminder as before. A moat protects a company's margins, and those margins are what pay and grow the dividend. The stronger the moat, the safer the raise. These two are the stickiest moats of all. *Disclosure: This is education, not …

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