How This Weird “Dividend Magnet” Drove 252% Gains (and Crushed ETFs)

Our Archive

Search completed

If I can give you just one piece of advice to start 2023, it’s this: do not trust your dividend income to ETFs!

It’s one of the biggest mistakes I see people make—especially with the market’s gains this year. These first-level players (wrongly!) think that in a rising market, they can buy pretty well anything and be A-OK.

Not so.

In fact, a rising market when you’re most likely to buy low-quality investments, puts your portfolio in danger in the next downturn. Just ask anyone who bought crypto or profitless tech in 2021!

And dividend ETFs are at the very top of our list of assets to avoid, not only now but always.… Read more

Read More

The Vanguard Dividend Appreciation ETF (VIG) is the largest and most popular dividend ETF on Wall Street. It boasts an amazing $60 billion in assets under management, and holds about 300 of the largest dividend stocks.

And it yields a miserable 2.1%.

That’s because, like many index funds, VIG weights stocks by size. That means companies like $450 billion drugmaker Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) and $1.8 trillion Big Tech icon Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) alone represent about 7% of the portfolio – even though they pay relatively light yields of 2.5% and 1.1%, respectively.

The false promise of index funds like the Vanguard Dividend Appreciation ETF is that you can “set it and forget it.”… Read more

Read More

Let me show you 3 headlines I ran across last week:

“Tax Cuts and Confidence Drive Surge of Payouts”
—Barron’s

“Global Dividends Break New Record in 2017, With More to Come for the Year Ahead”
—Institutional Asset Manager

“Trump’s Tax Cuts in Hand, Companies Spend More on Themselves Than Wages”
—New York Times

What do they have in common?

They’re all blaring out the fact that American companies have so much cash that they can’t ship it out to investors fast enough! Funny thing is, the herd is completely ignoring this fact. Check this out:

The Black Sheep …

We’re looking at the performance of the Vanguard Dividend Growth ETF (VIG), a good benchmark for stocks that consistently grow their dividend payouts, compared to the benchmark SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY) as of March 1.…
Read more

Read More

Categories