It was as much a surprise to StreetAuthority’s co-founder as it was to us. As an experiment, he tried to build a personal portfolio of dividend paying stocks to see if he could get 30 dividend checks in a month. But he achieved far more than the joy of receiving dividends every day. And all he did was simply enroll his securities in an automatic reinvestment program through an online brokerage account.  And before long, our little experiment was beating the market. Of course we were familiar with the power of the compounding growth of dividend reinvestment. As you can… Read More

It was as much a surprise to StreetAuthority’s co-founder as it was to us. As an experiment, he tried to build a personal portfolio of dividend paying stocks to see if he could get 30 dividend checks in a month. But he achieved far more than the joy of receiving dividends every day. And all he did was simply enroll his securities in an automatic reinvestment program through an online brokerage account.  And before long, our little experiment was beating the market. Of course we were familiar with the power of the compounding growth of dividend reinvestment. As you can see from the chart below, if you invested $20,000 in securities paying a 7% yield, after 10 years your portfolio would be worth $39,343 with reinvested dividends. And if your holdings happened to boost their dividends by just 5% annually — something even giant blue chip AT&T (NYSE: T) has been able to beat — your portfolio would be sitting at $46,475. That’s an increase of 132.4%. And that’s assuming zero capital gains. That isn’t bad, especially when you consider the S&P 500 Index lost 26.5% in the ten-year period ended in 2009. But the income part of… Read More

Even with the market setting new highs day after day, we haven’t really seen the kind of celebratory mood that should come with such record-breaking performances. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to see stocks rallying. In the past 12 months alone, defying skeptics, the S&P 500 index added some 18.7%, including dividends. The S&P’s annual return is impressive, but it’s still lagging behind the Nasdaq Composite’s 29%, and the blue-chip Dow Industrials, which returned 22% the past year. And this is on top of an already-strong showing, which became the second-longest bull market on record as of last May. Read More

Even with the market setting new highs day after day, we haven’t really seen the kind of celebratory mood that should come with such record-breaking performances. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to see stocks rallying. In the past 12 months alone, defying skeptics, the S&P 500 index added some 18.7%, including dividends. The S&P’s annual return is impressive, but it’s still lagging behind the Nasdaq Composite’s 29%, and the blue-chip Dow Industrials, which returned 22% the past year. And this is on top of an already-strong showing, which became the second-longest bull market on record as of last May. Still, judging by the emails I’ve been getting, many investors are nervous. It’s not surprising that the memory of the last bear market is still fresh in the minds of many investors. After all, it’s only been eight years since the S&P 500 bottomed (along with many retirement accounts). And that crash came soon after the dot-com crash at the turn of the century. The investors who needed that money the most — recent retirees and those who were about to retire — suffered immensely through these two downturns. It’s quite possible that the stress of these two bear markets… Read More