Lightway

Market Timing vs. Dividend Income Strategies

That's only if you take into account just initial yields. Most of the dividend investors here go after companies that have a track record of continuously raising their dividends year after year.

Look at D4L's explanation of Yield on Cost here, he shows how a Royal Bank of Canada share purchase in 1997 would have initially yielded 3.3%, yet that same share 10 years later has a Yield on Cost of 14.8%.

That's why initial yield is important, but identifying companies with a strong trend of raising their dividend is even more important.

www.dividends4life.com...

On Jul 29 07:52 AM BioBoy wrote:

> I fail to see how holding those stocks allows you to sleep at night.
> Those yields might keep up with inflation, but will generally be
> matched by the safer, more stable CD. "Daily market gyrations" might
> just be noise, but when you have multi-year gyrations of +/- 30%,
> a decades worth of dividend gains might be wiped out in a month.
> Dividend investing is certainly easy and requires little attention,
> but in reality it is a crap shoot just like all buy-and-hold investing.
> (Works great if you bought in 1945 and held for the next 60 years...
> otherwise, not so much.)