Global Macro Trading Journal
- Thread starter Daal
- Start date
Price appreciation is very important, people use that 'most of the return come from dividends' as if there was some kind of simple edge of just buying high yielders and enjoying your retirement.
Stocks tend to fall by the same amount of the dividend the day it is paid, you only get to keep the money to the extent that the price appreciation after the payment bounces back and this usually only happens in healthy companies who have rising earnings over the years
My point is that picking a company that will do well in terms of earnings is far more important than how much it yields. I don't believe there is any edge at all of high yielders compared to low yielders, even if during certain period of time they outperform(just like small cap can beat big caps during certain periods but then it reverses)
Sure they're important, but no more important than dividends. Historically they were equally important as they contributed equal quantities to total returns.
You're getting side-tracked in discussing high-yield equities vs. low-yield equities. That's not the point I was trying to make. I'm looking at the S&P 500 yield as a whole.
The market's overall dividend yield has historically been a good prognosticator of future total returns. Currently, big cap dividends are forecasting approx. 5% total returns over the next decade. Before taxes and inflation that's nothing to get overly excited about, considering the risk investors are taking.
This is exactly correct.
Maybe there's something in the water, for the past few months the latest big fad on ET has been the 'discovery' that dividend-payers are somehow inherently superior investments to non-dividend-payers, or that an investment portfolio must be constructed exclusively of dividend-paying stocks, or most bizarrely that corporate shares are worthless except insofar as they "pay out real cash."
Never mind that dividends come out of retained earnings, which if not paid out would mean a higher stock price. Never mind that (as you say) the price falls to account for dividend payouts. Never mind that in a liquid market, there is no practical difficulty in monetizing all or part of your investment and thus no need to receive a "steady stream of cash" - which, if you are looking for compound returns, gets reinvested right back into the shares anyway making the whole exercise completely pointless.
We should all hope these sorts of beliefs become widespread however, as it would mean chronic undervaluation of all those 'worthless' non-dividend stocks.
Really is that so? What data are you basing that on or is that purely your personal opinion?
I don't read a whole lot of the rest of ET, but agree with your assessment that sentiment is getting a bit frothy regarding dividend payers. Sharply higher interest rates would certainly cool the heck out of that sort of talk, but it would cool the heck out of non-dividend payers as well. The evidence (as noted by the graph) that dividend payers outperform over time is pretty overwhelming though.
You also leave price out of the equation. Buying a firm (whose business/earnings into the future you have a pretty good idea will continue to grow at a steady, if slow rate) at a 10 PE provides a huge margin of safety.
Again, it goes against everything in the human mind, but don't forget your Buffett. If WMT (let's give MSFT a break) continues to run its business over the next 10-15 and make profits as I expect, I should literally pray for the stock to go to $45 and just stay there for the entire time. The ROI will be far higher that way.
And are these hypothetical results constructed in a way that would have been possible to capture real-time? In other words are we taking a set of trading rules (e.g. invest equally in the highest 10% of dividend-payers and reconstruct the portfolio every 18 months, once LT CG rates kick in) and backtesting it, taking into account taxes and trading costs, or are we just observing that the stocks which in hindsight paid out the highest dividends over the last decade were also good investments generally?
As always (and as Ralph says above) the goal is to buy strong companies with good future earnings prospects at the lowest possible level of valuation. This may, but does not necessarily, have anything to do with whether the company pays a dividend.
You are correct BTW that dividend yield can be used to approximate future market returns, as the yield is an indicator of the market's valuation level (high in this case).