Thursday, October 28, 2010

THE TOP 40 DIVIDEND STOCKS FOR 2011 Is Well Underway

For the past month, I have been preparing the manuscript for THE TOP 40 DIVIDEND STOCKS FOR 2011. The process proceeds along two parallel paths:


--The screening and selection process for the Top 40 stocks themselves.
--The writing (or rewriting) of the text.


One significant change in the text next year is that I am adding a chapter on the role of dividend stocks in funding retirement. This new chapter is based on my five-article series on Financing Retirement that appeared here earlier this year. The series was very popular and generated significant comments. To convert the articles into a Chapter for THE TOP 40, I am rearranging and condensing the material. I am also working in new or refined concepts that that came up in the comments and in my responses to those comments.


I am also making textual changes to emphasize that the e-book is about dividend growth investing. The subtitle next year will be How to Accumulate Wealth or Generate Income from Dividend-Growth Stocks. References in the text to "Sensible Dividend Investors" are being changed to "Dividend Growth Investors." The e-book has always been about dividend growth investing (as opposed to, say, investing in preferred shares, whose payout rates do not grow). Now the text will be more consistent in reflecting that.


On the stock-selection side, I again this year started out with about 700 stocks. (I collect references to and recommendations of dividend stocks throughout the year.) I am about two-thirds done with paring this starting list down to the real contenders. I do this by applying several minimal requirements regarding yield, consistency of raising dividends, and the like. That will get the list down to around 200 stocks. Then another round of screening will pare the list further to the 75 or so stocks that actually have a realistic chance of being one of the Top 40.


I am aiming for a publication date in January. Some magazine articles or special issues about investing in 2011 are already hitting the shelves in stores. But I like to wait for the current year to end so that I can use full-year 2010 data in my analyses.


I will keep you posted on the progress of THE TOP 40 DIVIDEND STOCKS FOR 2011: How to Accumulate Wealth or Generate Income from Dividend-Growth Stocks every few weeks until the publication date.

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Yield on Cost: How It Works

An important concept in income investing is yield on cost, but it is often misunderstood. Let’s look under the hood.

The basic idea is easy: Yield on cost is the income yield, right now, on money that you invested 10 minutes ago, a few months ago, or 10 years ago. It is determined by this simple formula:

Yield on Cost = Past 12 Months Income / Price You Paid.

I use the past 12 months’ income in this formula, because it is the only income we are sure about. (“Indicated” yield, based on the expected continuation of the most recent dividend payout, is also often used. I explain the nuances at the end of the article.)

Here’s an example taken from the latest Portfolio Review of my illustrative Dividend Portfolio. The review was conducted in August (read about it in this article: “Portfolio Forensics”), so the “Price Now” number is out of date, but it is perfect for illustration.
Stock  MCD (McDonald's)
Date Bought 4/30/08 and 3/30/09
Price When Bought $60.06 and $53.93
Price Now $71.70
Price Return 19% and 32%
Current Yield 3.1%
Yield on Cost 3.7% and 4.1%
Action to Take Hold

You can see that I purchased McDonalds twice, in April 2008 and again in March 2009. The “Current Yield” shows MCD’s yield at the time of the review, based upon its price then. Note that it is the same for both purchases. That’s because current yield is based on current price. There's only one current price.

Current Yield = Past 12 Months Income / Current Price

In contrast, the “Yield on Cost” shows two yields, one for each purchase. That’s because yield on cost is based on the price you paid, not what the stock is selling for today. Note how my first purchase (2008) is now yielding 3.7%, while my second purchase (2009) is yielding even more, 4.1%. That is because the price went down between my two purchases. Each of the two purchases of MCD pays out the same dividend per share, obviously. But when you convert that dollar number into a percentage yield on cost, the divisor is different for each purchase, hence there are two yields on cost. The only way they would be identical is if the price had been identical when I made each of the two purchases.

This simple example allows me to illustrate several bedrock principles of dividend growth investing.

Each time the dividend increases, your yield on cost goes up. I went back and checked the then-current yield of MCD on the dates I made the two purchases. In 2008, it was $1.875 / $60.06 = 3.1%. In 2009, it was 1.75 / 53.93 = 3.2%. (Don’t be misled into thinking MCD lowered its dividend from 2008 to 2009. At the beginning of 2008, MCD switched from a single annual dividend to four quarterly dividends per year. The 2008 calculation “caught” an extra quarter of dividends, namely the first quarterly payment in March 2008.) Because of MCD’s annual dividend increases, my yield on cost on the two purchases has risen from 3.1% to 3.7% for the first purchase, and from 3.2% to 4.1% for the second purchase. The increase in yield on cost is a mathematical certainty if the dividend is increased, because the divisor (the price you paid) remains the same for as long as you own the stock.

Yield on cost is a measure of current performance, not past performance. Some people feel that yield on cost is a backwards-looking measure. That is incorrect. Because it is based on the most recent 12 months’ dividend payout—the last annual amount that we know for sure—yield on cost is a current measure of performance. Of course, today’s yield on cost “got there” because of past dividend increases, but it is a current performance metric.

Yield on cost is directly comparable to a bond’s yield. Bonds, as we know, are fixed-income investments. You pay $x for the bond, and its yield is stated and set for the term of the bond. It is a contractual obligation of the bond issuer, to whom you have lent money by buying the bond. So if you bought a bond yielding 4% in 2008, it is still yielding 4% to you. It will always yield 4% to you. It may pay a different yield to someone who buys it on the bond market today (because its price may have changed), but that has no impact on its yield to you. Its yield on cost will always equal its yield on the day you bought it.

Yield on cost can be considered to be your “personal” yield on a dividend-paying stock. It is dependent on the price you paid. The current yield stated in the newspaper or on Yahoo or Morningstar applies to someone who purchases the stock today. It is irrelevant to your yield on cost.

The dividend increases in a dividend-growth stock can cause its yield to surpass that of a bond which may have started out ahead. As just stated, if you buy a bond yielding 4% and hold it, it will always yield 4% to you. But the increasing dividends of a dividend-growth stock will cause its yield on cost—your personal yield—to inexorably climb, often reaching and then surpassing the annual income on a bond that originally paid more. In the year following my 2008 purchase of MCD, it paid $1.75 per share in dividends, or 2.9% based on my purchase price. In the past 12 months, it has paid me $2.20, or 3.7%. That’s a 26% increase in dollars in just a year. Looking ahead, MCD has already announced an increase in its dividend for the fourth quarter of this year (from $0.55 to $0.61) an 11% hike that will raise the dollars to me in the next 12 months to $2.44, for a yield on cost of 4.1% on my 2008 purchase. (This is the forward-looking “indicated” yield on cost; see the last paragraph of this article.)

Price and initial yield matter. My 2008 purchase at $60.06 had sunk to $53.93 by the time of my second purchase in 2009. Why would I buy more of a sinking stock? Because it was a better deal--a classic value-investing concept. I had long-term faith in McDonald’s the company. I still do. I wasn’t thrilled that its price drop had cost me 10% in capital losses. But I didn’t plan to sell it, and in dividend growth investing one focuses on the dividend stream. In the year between the two purchases, MCD had jacked up its dividend from $1.50 in calendar 2007 to $1.625 in 2008 (an 8% jump), and it would jack it up another 26% in 2009 to $2.05. I could not have expected that magnitude of increase, of course, but I certainly expected an increase—after all, MCD had been raising its dividend for 32 consecutive years.

Yield on cost and current yield gradually diverge from each other. If a stock’s price increases at exactly the same rate that the company increases the dividend each year, the current yield won’t budge. This fakes out some people, who equate yield on cost to current yield. As we have seen, they are quite different, as the yield on cost rises with each dividend increase. Some dividend-growth investors believe the increasing dividends are themselves a major reason that dividend-growth stocks tend to wallop all stocks in total return. The reasoning is that if the price decreases, the current yield increases, making the stock more attractive to income investors, who pile into the stock and drive its price back up—so the stock’s price tends to rise along with its dividend. It is not unusual to see a stock’s current yield stay pretty much the same year after year, even though its dividend is raised each year. The dividend increases are matched by approximately equal percentage increases in the price of the stock, so mathematically the current yield stays the same. MCD’s current yield is 2.9%, and its indicated current yield is 3.2%, both in the same range as when I bought it in 2008 and 2009. But my yields on cost, as already explained, are much higher.

If you don’t separate out new purchases from old ones, your “blended” yield on cost will often go down with a new purchase. A new purchase at, say, 3.1% current yield, when combined with an old purchase at, say, 4.1% yield on cost, will make the combined yield on cost lower. (At the moment of purchase, yield on cost and current yield are identical.) That’s why I track each purchase separately. It makes clear what is really happening: The new purchase has not diminished the yield on cost of a purchase made years ago. That never happens. What does happen is that the yield on cost of the original purchase continues to march upwards, while the new purchase starts at its current yield on the day of purchase, then commences its own upward march when the next dividend increase is declared.

Finally, a couple of points about the basic formulas.

 (1) The formula for yield on cost could be Yield on Cost = (Last Quarter’s Dividends x 4) / Price You Paid. That formula differs from the one stated at the beginning of this article only in that it projects the current dividend payout rate forward (without presuming an increase). The proper name for this is “indicated” yield on cost.

(2) A similar change can be made in the formula for current yield, producing the “indicated” current yield.

Monday, October 11, 2010

September Rally Continues into October; Have Re-entered the Market for Capital Gains

1. Summary

The market has been generally rising since the beginning of September. The rally has pulled the Timing Outlook to a strongly positive reading of 8.0, up from 6.0 last time.

For over four months, the S&P 500 had stayed stuck in a trading range of 1,040 to 1,130, essentially going sideways. The index finally passed through and stayed above 1130 on September 20, and it has stayed above that level ever since, slowly drifting upward in fits and starts. (See the chart below. Click on it to enlarge it.)



As frequent readers know, I require not only a positive Timing Outlook but also the satisfaction of a separate set of criteria to invest money in my Capital Gains Portfolio. The additional criteria, again, are:
• 9% rise over two weeks, with at least 7/10 days positive
• 3% rise over 3 weeks, with at least 10/15 days positive
• 4% rise over 4 weeks, with at least 14/20 days positive
• 5% rise over 5 weeks, with at least 17/25 days positive
• Etc.

The criteria were finally met on September 14, and I invested 10% of the portfolio’s funds on that day and another 10% a week later. There have been enough “down” days sprinkled in since then, however, to keep me from investing any more. This has cost me some gains as 80% of the portfolio sits in cash, but I will continue to require the additional margin of safety that the second criteria provide. Long term, that discipline has served me well.

Because I am hard at work on 2011’s edition of The Top 40 Dividend Stocks, I do not have up-to-date Easy-Rate™ sheets for capital-gains stocks. Therefore, for re-entering the market, I have purchased shares of SPY, one of the ETFs that tracks the S&P 500. I am following the market at the end of each day, and if the second set of criteria are satisfied, I will make another purchase.

The market’s action for the past three months is shown on the chart. It shows that the S&P 500 has risen about 11% since the beginning of September. It also shows the number of “down” days (red candlesticks) that frustrate the second criteria, even though the overall direction has been upwards.

My Dividend Portfolio remains 100% invested after the changes described last time. By the way, I have begun to work on the 2011 edition of The Top 40 Dividend Stocks. I will keep you up to date on its progress. I hope to release it in January.

2. Market Performance Since Last Outlook
(“now” figures are as of mid-morning, Monday, October 11, 2010)

Last Outlook (9/13/10): 6.0 (positive)
S&P 500 last time (9/13/10): 1122
S&P 500 now: 1167 Change: +4%

S&P 500 at beginning of 2010: 1115
S&P 500 now: 1167 Change in 2010: +5%

S&P 500 at close 3/9/09 (beginning of bull market): 677
S&P 500 now: 1167 Change since 3/9/09: +72%

3. Indicators in Detail

• Conference Board Index of Leading Economic Indicators: The most recent report (September 23) showed an increase in this index, the second in a row. I require three straight monthly increases or decreases to label this as positive or negative, so this indicator remains neutral. +5

• Fed Funds Rate: No change. With the Federal Funds rate near zero, this indicator remains positive. +10

• S&P 500 Market Valuation (P/E): Morningstar pegs the current P/E of the S&P 500 at 14.7, up from 13.7 last time, but still well within positive territory at any value below 17.4. +10

• Morningstar’s Market Valuation Graph. Morningstar’s proprietary market valuation graph is at 1.00, up from 0.96 last time and suggesting that the market is exactly at “fair value” right now. For our purposes, that means neutral. +5

• S&P 500 Short Term Technical Trend: This short-term technical indicator uses the two shorter simple moving averages (SMAs) of the S&P 500. The configuration (see the chart) is Index > 20-day > 50-day. That suggests rally mode, with the index “pulling up” the shorter SMA, which in turn is “pulling up” the longer SMA. Positive. +10

• S&P 500 Medium Term Technical Trend: The mid-term indicator remains ambiguous, as the 200-day SMA is still higher than the 50-day SMA. If (when) the 50-day crosses through and above the 200-day, that will be known as a “golden cross,’ which many consider to be one of the strongest technical indicators. Until then (if it happens), this indicator remains neutral. +5

• DJIA Short Term Technical Trend: This chart looks similar to the S&P 500 chart. Positive. +10

• DJIA Medium Term Technical Trend: On the Dow, the “golden cross” took place a few days ago. Positive. +10

• NASDAQ Short Term Technical Trend: The NASDAQ’s chart has the same configuration as the S&P’s for both trends. Positive. +10

• NASDAQ Medium Term Technical Trend: Neutral. +5

TOTAL POINTS: 80
NEW READING: 80 / 10 = 8.0 = POSITIVE