About Our Dividend Growth Newsletter

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At Valuentum, we seek to deliver to our subscribers the best investment ideas. And our Dividend Growth Newsletter does just that for income investors. We provide the following in each edition of our monthly newsletter: 

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The Benefits of Dividend Growth Investing

History has revealed that the best performing stocks during the previous decades have been those that shelled out ever-increasing cash to shareholders in the form of dividends. In a recent study, S&P 500 stocks that initiated dividends or grew them over time registered roughly a 9.6% annualized return since 1972 (through 2010), while stocks that did not pay out dividends or cut them performed poorly over the same time period. 

Such analysis is difficult to ignore, and we believe investors may be well-rewarded in future periods by finding the best dividend-growth stocks out there. As such, we've developed a rigorous dividend investment methodology that uncovers firms that not only have the safest dividends but also ones that are poised to grow them long into the future.

<< View Our Dividend Reports  

How did we do this? Well, first of all, we scoured our stock universe for firms that have cut their dividends in the past to uncover the major drivers behind the dividend cut. This is what we found out: The major reasons why firms cut their dividend had to do with preserving cash in the midst of a secular or cyclical downturn in demand for their products/services or when faced with excessive leverage (how much debt they held on their respective balance sheets).

The Importance of Forward-Looking Dividend Analysis 

Armed with this knowledge, we developed the forward-looking Valuentum Dividend Cushion™, which is a ratio that gauges the safety of a dividend over time.

Most dividend analysis that we’ve seen out there is backward-looking – meaning it rests on what the firm has done in the past. Although analyzing historical trends is important, we think assessing what may happen in the future is even more important. The S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrat List, or a grouping of firms that have raised their dividends for the past 25 years, is a great example of why backward-looking analysis can be painful. One only has to look over the past few years to see the removal of such big names from the Dividend Aristocrat List like General Electric (GE) and Pfizer (PFE) to understand that backward-looking analysis is hardly worth your time. After all, you’re investing for the future, so the future is all you should care about. 

We want to find the stocks that will increase their dividends for 25 years into the future, not use a rear-view mirror to build a portfolio of names that may already be past their prime dividend growth years. The Valuentum Dividend Cushion™ measures just how safe the dividend is in the future. It considers the firm’s net cash on its balance sheet and adds that to its forecasted future free cash flows and divides that sum by the firm’s future expected dividend payments. At its core, it tells investors whether the firm has enough cash to pay out its dividends in the future, while considering its debt load. If a firm has a Valuentum Dividend Cushion™ above 1, it can cover its dividend, but if it falls below 1, trouble may be on the horizon.

In fact, the Valuentum Dividend Cushion™ would have caught every dividend cut made by a non-financial, operating firm that we have in our database, except for one (Marriott). But interestingly, our Valuentum Dividend Cushion™ indicated that Marriott should have never cut its dividend, and sure enough, two years after the firm did so, it raised it to levels that were higher than before the cut.  

Here are the results of our study (a Valuentum Dividend Cushion™ below 1 indicates the dividend may be in trouble). The Valuentum Dividend Cushion™ score shown in the table below is the measure in the year before the firm cut its dividend, so it represents a predictive indicator:

The Valuentum Dividend Cushion continues to save investors from blunders well beyond our academic study. Please check out this article: Why Dividend Growth Investing Needs to Be Forward Looking.

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At the very least, using the Valuentum Dividend Cushion™ can help you avoid firms that are at risk of cutting their dividends in the future. And we are the only firm out there that does this type of in-depth analysis for you. Plus, we not only provide the actual Valuentum Dividend Cushion™ number for our subscribers in our dividend reports and newsletter, but we also scale the safety of a firm’s dividend in simple terms: Excellent, Good, Poor, Very Poor.

Here’s a glimpse of the Valuentum Dividend Cushion™ score (as of November 2011) for a sample set of firms in our coverage universe. Please note that the current scores of these firms and hundreds more are available with a membership to our website:

But What about the Growth of a Firm’s Dividend?

It takes time to accumulate wealth through dividends, so dividend growth investing requires a long-term perspective. As a result, we assess the long-term future growth potential of a firm’s dividend. And we don’t just take management’s word for what they will do with their dividend. Instead, we dive into the financial statements and make our own forecasts of the future to see if what they’re saying is actually achievable. We use our Valuentum Dividend Cushion™ as a way to judge the capacity for management to raise its dividend – how much cushion it has – and we couple that assessment with the firm’s dividend track record, or management’s willingness to raise the dividend.  

In many cases, we may have a different view of a firm’s dividend growth potential than what may be widely held in the investment community. That’s fine by us, as our dividend-growth investment horizon is often longer than others. We want to make sure that the firm has the capacity and willingness to increase the dividend years into the future and will not be weighed down by an excessive debt load or cyclical or secular problems in fundamental demand for their products/services.

Plus, we don’t use fancy language for what we think of its future growth. We scale our assessment in an easily-interpreted fashion: Excellent, Good, Poor, Very Poor.

<< View Our Dividend Reports 

What are the Dividend Ideas We Seek to Deliver to You in Our Newsletter?

First of all, we’re looking for stocks with dividend yields that are greater than the average of the S&P 500, or about 2% (but preferably north of 3%). This excludes many names, but we think such a cutoff eliminates firms whose dividend streams aren’t yet large enough to generate sufficient income. Second, we’re looking for firms that register an 'EXCELLENT' or 'GOOD' rating on our scale for both safety and future potential growth. And third, we’re looking for firms that have a relatively lower risk of capital loss, as measured by our estimate of the company’s fair value.  

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About Our Name

But how, you will ask, does one decide what [stocks are] "attractive"? Most analysts feel they must choose between two approaches customarily thought to be in opposition: "value" and "growth,"...We view that as fuzzy thinking...Growth is always a component of value [and] the very term "value investing" is redundant.

                         -- Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway annual report, 1993

At Valuentum, we take Buffett's thoughts one step further. We think the best opportunities arise from a complete understanding of all investing disciplines in order to identify the most attractive stocks at any given time. Valuentum therefore analyzes each stock across a wide spectrum of philosophies, from deep value to momentum investing. And a combination of the two approaches found on each side of the spectrum (value/momentum) in a name couldn't be more representative of what our analysts do here; hence, we're called Valuentum.

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Valuentum has developed a user-friendly, discounted cash-flow model that you can use to value any operating company that you wish. Click here to buy this individual-investor-friendly model now! It could be the best investment you make.

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Our Best Ideas Newsletter and Dividend Growth Newsletter are for information purposes only and should not be considered a solicitation to buy or sell any security. Valuentum is not responsible for any errors or omissions or for results obtained from the use of our newsletters, reports, and other publications and accepts no liability for how readers may choose to utilize the content. Valuentum is not a registered investment advisor and does not offer brokerage or investment banking services and adheres to professional standards and abides by formal codes of ethics that put the interests of clients and subscribers ahead of their own. Valuentum, its employees, and affiliates may have long, short or derivative positions in the stock or stocks mentioned on this site.