Welcome to the Dividend Informer!
Published by Equity Research Service (a subsidiary of the national non-profit investor education organization BetterInvesting), our newsletter service is designed to help self-directed investors like you to build and maintain a resilient, reduced volatility equity portfolio built around dividend-paying stocks. Dividend Informer delivers regular research and analysis on dividend-paying securities that provide long-term appreciation potential along with reduced volatility.
Each month, our analysts publish detailed, high-quality, income-oriented stock ideas for subscribers. These in-depth research reports are exclusive to the Dividend Informer newsletter. We also cover a universe of more than 50 high-quality companies with regularly-updated buy prices and sell recommendations as warranted.
In the Dividend Informer, you will discover actionable opportunities for your portfolio, through investing in growing companies with a track record of offering regular, increasing capital return in addition to potential for share price growth.
Read on to learn more about our approach to discovering quality candidates that can help your portfolio to earn returns in difficult markets while allowing you to sleep soundly at night.
Our Core Investment Philosophy: The “New Rules” of Dividend Investing
Traditional dividend strategies often focused strictly on chasing the highest yields. However, modern market shifts—including lower overall market yield averages and increased corporate capital allocation toward share buybacks—make pure high-yield chasing downright dangerous to portfolio returns.
Our focus is on Dividend Total Return: combining reasonable current yield with steady earnings growth, dividend increases, and long-term capital appreciation. This strategy by design has another important objective – to reduce the volatility inherent in a broad-based equity portfolio.
Dividend Informer delivers research on growing, mature companies that possess solid balance sheets, low debt, and robust free cash flow generation. These attributes allow companies to sustain and increase dividend payouts while insulating a portfolio from excessive market volatility.
Avoid Chasing High Yields. High yields often disguise underlying business stress or dividend cut risk. Prioritize overall company quality and total return potential.
The Dividend Informer strategy revolves around three key themes:
Quality First, Yield Second. High yield alone can signal a troubled business. We prioritize financial stability, earnings growth, and dividend growth over yield alone.
Comprehensive Capital Return. We evaluate companies that return capital through regular dividend growth, opportunistic share buybacks, and prudent debt reduction.
Reduced Portfolio Volatility. Ideal for investors seeking to “ease up on the throttle” from aggressive growth stocks while maintaining inflation protection.
Learn more about the mechanics behind our approach to dividend investing here.
Delivering News “Hot off the Press” on a Regular Basis
Dividend Informer is an online-only newsletter published on Substack and accessible via email, the web, or the Substack app.
Individuals can “follow” Dividend Informer for free. Followers receive excerpts of published posts, but only paying subscribers receive important metrics like buy prices or current dividend and fundamental trends.
Content is released continuously throughout the month rather than as a single static issue:
Decoding Summary Metrics in Company Write-Ups
Each company analysis features a summary panel displaying vital financial metrics. Understanding these figures is essential for evaluating stock attractiveness:
Monthly Coverage Spreadsheet
Each month, subscribers receive a complete spreadsheet with updated buy/sell and other metrics. This table can be downloaded into a spreadsheet application or viewed and sorted on the Dividend Informer website. Monitoring the metrics in this table is an important of a subscriber’s portfolio management practices to ensure that companies are still meeting their personal objectives.
Subscribers can also monitor the monthly coverage list table to identify which covered stocks currently offer attractive discounts.
Proprietary Dividend Informer Scoring System
To simplify quality analysis, our team assigns a score in four fundamental categories using an A - B - C - D scale (where A is strongest and D is weakest).
Implementing Dividend Informer in Your Portfolio
The Dividend Informer is an independent research service, not a model portfolio. We provide high-quality research on companies across most sectors, enabling self-directed investors to build a personalized, well-diversified portfolio tailored to their own total return, asset allocation, and risk tolerance objectives.
Determining When to Buy
Dividend stocks aren’t held to the same total return and valuation criteria as growth stocks. They are prized for their yield, their cash flow, their capital return to shareholders, and the potential for some growth in order to at least keep up with inflation. For example, without the strong upside that comes from being a growth stock, a 3:1 Upside-Downside or reward-to-risk ratio is much harder to achieve for the mature, cash-rich companies that we feature in Dividend Informer.
We apply a relative value framework to determine buy prices so that only stocks that are selling at discounts to their historical average or “signature” valuations are considered as purchase candidates.
We prefer buying stocks when their estimated forward P/E is trading at a discount relative to their 5-year historical average P/E. This ratio is known as “Relative Value.” When a stock is selling at a relative value below 100%, this is usually a sign that a purchase is optimal (as long as fundamental strength and quality is maintained).
It is usually preferable to buy a stock at a discount (when the P/E is below its typical level) rather than at a premium as is defined above. Subscribers can check the updated coverage list published each month with a current estimate of premium or discount available for each stock under coverage.
We still consider growth trends that are relevant to dividend investors to a certain degree. Some revenue growth is required, along with rising EPS, free cash flow, and dividend increases.
Using Dividend Informer in Your Personal Portfolio
We expect that subscribers will do their own supplemental research before acting on any stock recommended in the Dividend Informer to ensure that it fits with their personal portfolio diversification, total return, and risk tolerance objectives. Asset allocation and portfolio diversification objectives are highly personal, and we recommend working with a financial advisor if you are unsure about setting and achieving goals for yourself.
Portfolio Diversification & Asset Allocation
Diversify Across Sectors: Ensure your portfolio includes companies across multiple industries. Holding 10 banks or 10 energy stocks does not constitute a diversified portfolio.
Perform Supplemental Research: Always perform supplemental research to ensure a recommended stock aligns with your personal risk tolerance and financial goals.
Work with Advisors: If you are unsure about setting asset allocation targets, consider consulting a professional financial advisor.
Understanding the SSG®-Inspired Visual Graph
The Dividend Informer uses some of the methodology of national non-profit investor education organization BetterInvesting. Each company write-up includes a graph reminiscent of BetterInvesting’s Stock Selection Guide® (SSG®), which provides a graphical picture of whether or not a company’s sales, profits, and dividends have been growing over the past ten years.
Each focus stock write-up includes a visual chart reminiscent of BetterInvesting’s Stock Selection Guide® (SSG®).
This 10-year historical graph provides an instant graphical picture of corporate performance:
Sales, EPS & Free Cash Flow: Confirm that sales, earnings per share, and free cash flow per share have been growing consistently over the past 10 years. FCF per share should grow at least as rapidly as sales and EPS.
Dividends, Shares & Debt: Check dividend line history for regular annual increases. Review share count to verify share repurchases, and inspect annual debt levels to confirm prudent leverage management.
While the Dividend Informer is not an SSG newsletter and most companies will not be a perfect fit for users of that methodology, investors who are following a dividend-and-total-return strategy can certainly find much about the Dividend Informer that is similar to the SSG approach.
As you well know from every mutual fund advertisement, past performance is no guarantee of future results. Still, unless something has changed, the best predictor of what to expect in the future is often what has happened so far.
Contact Us
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