May 19, 2025
The Best Dividend Playbook by Josh Peters, CFA

Mr. Peters commences out in the Introduction introducing his most loved investor, Marjorie Bradt.

No, you’ve got never ever read of her. She was a customer of the brokerage he when labored for as an assistant. Ms. Bradt’s father gave her around $6,000 worth of shares of AT&T inventory in the late 1950s and early 1960s. She signed up for AT&T’s dividend reinvestment application, and simply held on to the shares and held on reinvesting dividends. In 1984 a courtroom requested AT&T to split up into the “Baby Bells,” and they have due to the fact spun off numerous firms. Most of them pay back dividends which she continued to reinvest. By 1999 her portfolio was really worth about $1 million dollars. Oddly, offered the issue of this reserve, Mr. Peters will not notify us what her yearly dividend cash flow was.

I have to wish he’d been ready to give us extra insight into Ms. Bradt. Did she even remembered she owned this inventory? Did she ever experience tempted to liquidate the stock? At some position she and her husband have to have felt the need to have for far more funds. Why failed to she include a lot more funds to the portfolio?

Nevertheless, it really is a terrific story. It really is not easily duplicatable, mainly because $6,000 was a large amount of revenue back in those people working day — a respectable middle-course once-a-year profits, imagine it or not. And for the reason that AT&T’s history is exclusive. Not all stocks would have done so perfectly, even above forty decades.

Regrettably, Mr. Peters himself does not screen as significantly patience. He mentions providing stocks that don’t meet his expectations.

And he’s pretty significantly into the analysis of particular person shares. Early on he dismisses the worth of mutual cash and exchange traded funds, and later criticizes the thought of diversification which, of system, is the rationale for traders putting their cash into mutual resources and trade traded money.

I obtain this a minor odd in a e book by an worker of Morningstar, which was launched to present buyers assistance on mutual resources. (Mr. Peters is the editor of Morningstar DividendInvestor, their publication on dividend investing.)

And this is the book’s weak spot, to my head. The writer is a fiscal analyst and plainly understands a ton about the enterprises that normally pay back dividends and how to crunch their figures.

On the other hand, this can make the complete system search incredibly challenging to the ordinary investor who is not a CFA. They may possibly commit a lot of hrs of their spare time attempting to duplicate what he does, and won’t occur close. They are not compensated to do it as a complete-time job, as he is.

Most viewers will not even check out. They’ll both give up on dividend investing or subscribe to DividendInvestor to get Mr. Peters’ tips on a regular, ongoing basis. And it can be difficult to believe that an individual at Morningstar, irrespective of whether the writer or not, is not hoping for that consequence.

I do salute the writer for making a place I imagined only I comprehended — that investing chance is not price volatility but authentic environment situations that force companies to reduce or quit paying dividends.

All in all, I endorse this ebook to everyone asking yourself no matter if investing for dividends is a good plan.