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Rob Isbitts talks to Brian Bollinger about their shared focus on dividend income (0:50). How dividend investing has evolved and where it’s going (9:00). Analyzing dividend safety, cuts (13:00). Verizon and why dividend growth investing is not fixed income (21:00). McDonald’s, Walgreens and trusting what management says about dividend plans (23:00). Lowe’s classic setup (28:20). Staying committed to a dividend portfolio (35:40).
Transcript
Rob Isbitts: Welcome to the Seeking Alpha Investing Experts Podcast. I have written for Seeking Alpha for a couple of years and I also run the new Investing Group, Sungarden YARP Portfolio. So I encourage you to check that out. It is very dividend income focused and that’s why I wanted to interview Brian Bollinger.
Brian is someone that I met, oh, I’m going to say a decade or so ago. He actually has a history on Seeking Alpha, and I’d like him to talk about that in just a second. But, you know, Brian really is to me, one of the unsung heroes of the dividend space for self-directed investors and I think that will be obvious, in the next little bit as we talk to him.
So Brian Bollinger, welcome to the Seeking Alpha Investing Experts Podcast.
Brian Bollinger: Thanks, Rob. It’s always great chatting with you and I’m happy to be here and, hopefully, help out some people with some good discussion on dividends.
RI: Great. We’ll get right into it. And but I think your background is so important, because when I met you, it was really because of a common connection. Because if I recall, back at the Kelley School at Indiana University, a great business school there, you had been a graduate, and you had, I believe, run or even founded the Portfolio Management Club. Is that right?
BB: Yes.
RI: And my son who is now in the industry, out on his own. But, at the time, he was a student, a very impressionable student. He was interning for me. And the trademark factor that we created and just became an index and is kind of the central part of the Investing Group, Sungarden YARP Portfolio that we launched earlier this year on Seeking Alpha that was all being sort of brewed and concocted around that time.
So I don’t know if you realize it, but you kind of had an indirect influence on that because my son was like wow. this is the guy who started the whole thing there. I’m part of it in Indiana, part of the legacy, if you will.
And so, first of all, thank you. And secondly, what do you think it says to aspiring dividend investors, even if they’re not college students, about how to go about getting interested in this part of the investment landscape?
BB: Yeah. It’s a really, really cool story and connection. Tyler is a great kid, and I hope he’s doing well now back in the real world after graduation flying by. But, yeah, I think it kind of speaks to investing in general is very approachable.
I think what Warren Buffett has said, right? You don’t need a high IQ. A lot of it’s more just understanding who you are, managing the behavioral side, and sticking to a long-term plan. So for me, as a college age kid, I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do.
My family’s background is not at all in the finance or investing world, but my love for it kind of came out of loving baseball actually as a kid. I loved baseball cards, playing the sport, you know, studying which players were great, reading their statistics.
And I had aspired, once my baseball game peaked out in the fifth grade, to become a general manager of a team where your job is to acquire players, sign them to the contracts, make trades, trying to build a team that can win a championship.And when I explored that path in college kind of briefly doing some unpaid work at IU’s athletic department, I realized it may not be a good fit for me after being in charge of important tasks like finding places for the girls’ volleyball team to eat on their road matches.
At the same time, I discovered investing. And it was very similar in a lot of ways to being a GM of a baseball team because instead of, you know, looking at stocks, you’re looking at players and you’re, I’m sorry, other way around. Instead of looking at players, you’re looking at stocks, right?
There’s different financial metrics on them. You’re trying to figure out what companies could be undervalued. You’re trying to build a portfolio together that can achieve a goal. So it was a pretty natural fit and, you know, I knew nothing back then. I know a little bit more now, but it’s a game that you keep learning and growing at each year.
RI: It’s funny you say that because I’m listening to you describe that in the whole baseball analogy. And I’m thinking to myself, wait a minute, was he telling the Brian Bollinger story, the Rob Isbitts story, the Tyler Isbitts story, or one of many millions of other, women and men who have had that same type of journey?
I think investing and sports, particularly the analytics of sports, which is so much more dominant today, I guess, than when we were a little bit younger, there’s a very close tie.
But very early in your career, it seems to me, you went the entrepreneurial route. And as they say, the rest is history. When I met you, I think you had a few 100 subscribers. So just tell everybody what Simply Safe Dividends is because I think that is the framework upon which we’re going to talk about dividend investing for the next little bit.
BB: Sure. So my origin story, I guess, in this world is I started off after school fortunate to land a job on the buy side for about a $10 billion money manager at the time near Chicago. They followed a bottom-up fundamental process with a few long only stock strategies. Their goal was to try and outperform the market.
So it was a wonderful place to kind of cut my teeth. I was given a lot of rope by the founder of the company. Forever grateful for that. Got to dig into 10-Ks and meet with CEOs, do all the kind of digging and research process, debate investments with colleagues. Loved the work.
It was a lot of fun, but I kind of found myself becoming a little disenchanted with parts of the financial services world. You know, it turns out it’s quite difficult to beat the market. ETFs were kind of starting to eat the lunch of active managers. You could kind of see the writing on the wall if you didn’t really have a differentiated process.
So I wanted to kind of rededicate my career, I guess, into something that I felt had more repeatable skill that was actually adding value and ideally helping individual investors instead of just the big institutional funds. So I decided to quit my investment job in 2015 I think it was.
And a few months later, I launched Simply Safe Dividends. The idea was again to kind of provide individual investors with research, tools, with a strategy that I really believed in that aligned with my own investment philosophy.
And Seeking Alpha did play a role for sure. Back then, it was very different than the site is today. Back then, there weren’t any subscription products on there. You had a little more flexibility, I would say, with what you could kind of publish and link to.
So it was really how I kind of got myself on the map. You know, you launched the sound of crickets and publishing, but I tried to make very high quality research on the site.
Really helped if you could get an article showcased on the front page, especially to get a lot of traffic and people would kind of discover you for the first time. If they like what they read, they may click through and kind of check out what your site’s all about.
RI: Boy, that’s, that is a great retelling of a story that I hope is still something that a lot of younger people in the investment industry can pursue. Frankly, I think a lot of them do through Seeking Alpha, which is great. I’ve mentored a lot over the years and it’s terrific to see because we have to keep repopulating, solid dividend, investing types and really all investing types, especially as the markets evolve.
And so if you can, I mean, investing is certainly evolving. Dividend investing has changed, I think, fairly dramatically, and I write about this a lot. But you have been knee deep in this for many, many years now.
So if you can, how do you think investing in dividend stocks has gone from where it was to where it is now and perhaps where it’s going?
BB: Maybe we could step way back and go, travel back in time to a simpler time in the early 1600s. This was when the first known publicly traded…
RI: You’re not going to go all medieval on me, are you?
BB: I might but only for 30 seconds. You can tolerate it.
RI: I can.
BB: Back then so the first publicly traded company was called the Dutch East India Company based in the Netherlands and it was established. It issued shares to investors like you and me, and it traded spices, tea, other goods between Europe and Asia had these exclusive trade routes. So what was so interesting about this company, if you were a shareholder, it was much more exciting than if you invest in dividends today because you didn’t just see an electronic deposit in your brokerage account.
You would often line up at the dock waiting to see these colonial trade ships flush with cash and other cargo come back in to evaluate their haul, and then you could receive cash dividends right there at the dock. And when you think about this, it kind of hammers home the point of dividends, right?
They’re a regular payment. They’re enabled by a company’s cash flow that it generates. And these payments establish trust and confidence among investors.
Back then, there was no easy access to a secondary trading exchange where you could sell your shares for x dollars, getting an instant quote during the day, a buyer right there with liquidity. You really had to focus on the fundamentals and be committed to your holdings and you’re owning it for that known cash in hand return.
So financial markets have obviously come a very far away since then. They’re very efficient today, but dividends have always played a part of corporate policy. It’s one of the mechanisms companies have to return the excess profits that they generate.
They’ve historically made up, I think it’s around a third of the S&P 500’s (SP500) returns over the past, whatever, 80, 100 years, something like that. And they do go through different periods where they’re in favor and less in favor, right, depending on things like changes to the tax code, just the general market environments.
If you look at a popular group of dividend stocks known as the Dividend Kings, these are companies that have raised their dividend every year for at least 50 straight years. The Kings with the longest streaks are all at about 70 years. And if you go back, why is that the case?
That would have been at the mid-1950s, while the tax code changed in 1954 where individuals could exempt a certain amount of dividends from their income and also take a small credit on dividends above that amount. So, that, I think, inspired a lot of companies to start these dividend growth policies.
So that’s one example of how tax code change can change the appeal of dividends at certain times, but also the market environment, which we’ve seen a lot the last couple of years, can make a big difference too on whether or not dividends are in favor in the near-term. But they’ve been around a long time. They’ll be around a long time, and you can do a lot of great things with them, especially if you’re thinking about retirement.
RI: Yeah. Look, I write all the time. I’m semi-retired guy. I was an advisor for a long time and a fund manager and sold the practice about five years ago. And so it’s funny when you go from being the fiduciary for other people’s money and all of a sudden you’re the client.
That I readily admit, that my interest in dividend investing was always high, but it really kind of hit the steroids in the last five years for exactly the reason that you are describing. And I do want to get back to kind of the contemporary dividend investment climate.
But before we do that, let’s go back, Simply Safe Dividends. I mean, I’ve been a subscriber for a long time. And I will say this, your work is sort of like having a couple of analysts in one’s pocket.
Now, Seeking Alpha does a great job of that too. You also have an analytics methodology that you have created to enhance over the years. So, if you can talk about the process, what you do at Simply Safe Dividends, and so that people can understand the mindset. And then, we’ll talk about current markets and name some names as they say.
BB: Yeah. So at a high level, I guess, when you’re thinking about what are we trying to do here, we’re not trying to chase our tail by trying to beat the market, we’re not trying to sell the dream of getting a safe 8%, 10% plus yield that’ll last you 30 years in retirement.
A lot of that’s just nonsense. At the end of the day, we are just trying to help everyday investors like you and me build and maintain these dividend portfolios that can generate safe income, grow that income every year at a rate that offsets inflation, and preserve and grow their capital over time.
So when you do this, especially if you think about how can I earn money when I stop working, if you’re able to live off of dividends, you don’t need to worry about selling shares to make ends meet, you don’t have to worry about what the market’s going to do next year, if it’s cheaper or expensive right now, you get a lot of peace of mind whenever the tide goes out. So that’s really our driving goal, is to help people achieve peace of mind by building these quality rising dividend portfolios.
And to do that, well, you have to make sure that you’re assembling a portfolio that adheres to reasonable risk management practices, and you have to identify the securities to own that can kind of get you there.
A lot of our time is spent on both of those points really with the tools we’ve developed, our portfolio tracker, but a lot of research time as well as you kind of alluded to.
Getting under the hood on these different companies, trying to help people spot when a dividend looks safe or potentially risky over a full economic cycle, and you really can’t cut corners. We’ve looked at a lot of quantitative data out there. There’s so much noise in the information. Payout ratios can be volatile, just accounting data in general.
So it takes a lot of qualitative work to understand kind of what’s happening, where things could be going, in addition to monitoring some of the financial metrics, which we can talk more about that if you want to. There’s a lot there on how to kind of analyze a dividend stock, but I’ll leave it at that.
RI: Analytics and, I’m a huge fan of the Seeking Alpha Quant grades. I tilt towards some more than others. You have a dividend safety score, which I don’t know, it certainly wasn’t the first of its kind, but it was one of the ones I think that kind of beat some others to the punch.
Can you talk about how you develop? Because, I’m sitting here thinking, it’s getting a little bit tougher for dividend investors simply because of what companies are doing with their cash flow. They’re buying back more stock.
I trademarked a dividend index. And so looking back at the history and I see, wow, it’s not as easy to get, let’s say, a 4% yield today, and inflation is higher, T-bills are better competition than they were for about 15 years probably from before you even started Simply Safe Dividends.
Talk about that as the challenge of finding companies to put a portfolio together because I know I have had moments, this recent period is one of them, where I say, wow, even if I wanted to have a 30 or 40 dividend stock portfolio, I don’t know if I could do it without having an extremely long-term time horizon, which you do as compared to a lot of stuff I do.
But talk about that, because that I think that’s part of the evolution and kind of bringing it up to where we are today, because dividend investing, tell me if you agree, but I think it has changed a bit simply because stock prices have elevated, and it’s dropped the dividend yields and companies are maybe not replenishing the yield even if they keep increasing the dividend.
BB: There’s a lot to unpack there, and a lot of it does tie into also this issue of dividend safety, which you kind of mentioned at the front.
So, yes, I think we were one of the first companies to have dividend safety scores, but we’re the only company that I’m aware of that actually shows a public real time track record of all 800 plus dividend cuts we’ve seen across our coverage universe since we started doing this, to show you what our score was before the cut happened. So, no back testing, just see real raw results kind of tied to our different…
RI: You said 800?
BB: Yeah. Over 800 dividend cuts. Since 2015, across the roughly 1,000 companies that are in our coverage universe. Yeah.
RI: I’m sorry. 800 companies have cut or 800 cuts, incidents?
BB: 850 cuts. And some of those companies may not be in our coverage universe today. They could have suspended their dividends or gotten merged and acquired, but we’ve seen — we’ve recorded over 850 cuts across all the companies we’ve covered the last decade have come through. A lot of those came through from COVID.
About one in four companies cut or suspended their dividends during COVID in our coverage universe. But yes. So we have this system we use, a lot of analyst work to kind of identify and show you which company’s dividends look safe or not, and we kind of back it up with our real time track record. So that’s a big factor to consider.
And when you’re building this type of portfolio that you’re talking to, if you’re focused on dividends, you need safe dividends. That’s the big risk you’re taking with this strategy over a full economic cycle.
And to your point, the universe of higher yielding stocks that might appeal to someone who’s focused more on current income today has definitely shrunk for a few different reasons.
But I would say that the increase in interest rates has made it more, really feasible than ever before to kind of own. It could be anywhere from a 60-40 to even, like, a 90-10 dividend stock and bond portfolio where you can have this fixed income side, now that can make a little bit of sense because you can earn some real interest income and have this steady value of bonds to draw on to kind of supplement income in the early years.
So I don’t think, even if you’re trying to target, like, a 5% withdrawal rate, which I don’t think is crazy today with this type of approach, you don’t have to get that just from owning 5% plus yielding stocks.
In fact, that’s not a great strategy because you’re giving up a lot of future growth. That’s a big issue if you’re looking at 30 years. You can do that by owning a portfolio that might yield 3%, 2.5%, but you’re blending it with something on the fixed income side to kind of meet that income on the early years, leave the stocks untouched as they grow those dividends at maybe 8% to 10% annual rate.
And over time, that snowball effect is huge with the amount of dividends that portfolio is going to be throwing off in 10, 15, 20 years when your bond side is smaller or even depleted.
You’ll have a stock portfolio that’s way bigger than when you started and a dividend stream that is covering the withdrawals you need to make, all without having to really worry what the market is doing during that time. You’re just focused on companies with safe and growing dividends and making sure you’re aligned with those companies throughout that window, which is kind of the easier part in some ways.
RI: Well, that’s a great summary of, I think, why so many Seeking Alpha community members like dividend growth investing. You just said it. Maybe I would summarize it as, dividend growth investing is not fixed income.
And, obviously, it’s not bonds, but it is unfixed or it is floating, but it typically floats higher if you find the right companies, the safer companies. And that ends up being a bit of an inflation fighter at least to the extent that your income is.
And I think, again, I think what you’re saying is that, hey, don’t be chasing the highest dividend yield because first of all, it might not be sustainable from a safety standpoint, right?
BB: That’s definitely a possibility. The growth side is an even bigger not necessarily bigger, but definitely a big concern over the course of 10, 20, 30 years.
I mean, you look at a stock like a Verizon (VZ), which you know, I own Verizon. It’s not a huge position, but it’s one of the bond-like stocks I’ll have in my portfolio. It gets you a pretty secure 6% yield, but you’re seeing paltry growth. You’re not going to see more than 1% to 2% type of dividend growth from that position.
If you have, you know, 10 years, 15 years of time, you can buy a stock that’s yielding, you know, 2%, but growing that dividend 8% to 12% a year, and you’re going to surpass the annual income from that Verizon stock over that window as that keeps compounding.
So definitely an important factor, especially with a more uncertain inflation outlook in the years ahead than we’ve really had in a very long time.
RI: Verizon is a good example. I have owned it as well.
Give us some more examples, I would say, not only of the things that you’re finding attractive, but since it seems like you do this research, “by hand,” as few do, can you speak to things like the motivation of management and the commitment to increasing the dividend and even maintaining the dividend?
Because I’m suspecting that is something that probably an AI-driven system might not find quite as easily. How do you go beyond that to the nuances to make sure there is commitment to the dividend by management?
BB: Yeah. The AI stuff is pretty interesting. I mean, we’ve looked at it a little bit with our company. Everything we do is done by human analysts. I’ll just kind leave it at that.
But if you look at some of these tools that are out there, like, they’re pretty cool. FinChat is a big one right now. You’re seeing a lot of, companies kind of using them to make it easy to, you know, type in a text request on really anything financial, and it’ll kind of spit you back all this information.
But the rate at which these tools hallucinate is just crazy. I mean, I asked FinChat, is Pfizer’s (PFE) dividend safe? It sent me back all this foreign currency information. It made no sense. It’ll improve, I’m sure, but you have to be very careful because these things can sound smart, but that’s really their biggest strength.
If you’re not really verifying things, you really have to be careful if you’re trying to get actionable, trustworthy advice. I just haven’t seen it yet from these AI tools. So how do you do this?
To give you an example, this summer, one of the stocks we highlighted in our newsletter was McDonald’s (MCD), a real shocker from someone like me who’s boring and conservative.
But at the time, this is early July, stock was down about 15% on the year, so underperforming pretty badly. There are a lot of concerns about these fast food price wars. After years of menu price hikes, consumers are kind of tapped out with a cumulative effect of inflation. McDonald’s had rolled out its $5 meal deal.
So the gloves are off, and analysts were pretty worried about the near-term outlook for growth even though it’s you know, the 30-plus years of profits McDonald’s will generate are what going to drive its value.
So we took a look at this stock. It’s been around since 1940 doing the same thing. It’s a unique company in that around 90% of its operating profit comes from fees and royalties from franchised restaurants.
It’s fairly insulated from near-term shifts in restaurant profitability, very predictable earnings, margins near 50%, BBB+ credit rating, one of the world’s most iconic brands, huge long-term growth trajectory in China alone.
I think it has around 5,000 stores there, maybe 6,000 today out of its 40,000 locations. No reason that couldn’t double or triple or more in the future. So it kind of felt like nothing has changed at all with McDonald’s long-term outlook.
Financial health is again, quite solid. The payout ratio is below 60%. You have a good runway for earnings to grow and for the dividend to keep growing at probably a 5% to 10% annual clip.
And the stock was selling at a pretty big discount to its normal PE ratio and to the broader market as well despite having, in my opinion, more predictable earnings and no change really to the long-term outlook.
So those are the types of situations we kind of look for where we kind of feel like the future no one can ever predict the future, but 5 years to 10 years out looks stable. The company’s financial health looks good, supportive of both, the company’s value and the dividend safety profile.
You know, management teams are always going to talk about the dividend. Not always, but a lot of them do. But you can’t necessarily put a bunch of weight on what they say.
Walgreens (WBA) is kind of a classic example. I think it was only six months or nine months before they cut the dividend. They were saying how, you know, the dividend is basically untouchable. It’s a huge priority until it’s not.
So you have to get a good feel for the challenges if a company is facing them if they are truly temporary, fixable, or if they’re more of an indictment that, hey this company’s earnings power has changed because management teams never want to cut the dividend.
But if something has truly changed, they need to prioritize fixing the balance sheet or they just start dealing with a big shift in their industry. Sometimes there’s nothing they can do. They have to go to the dividend to really focus on turning the ship around. So, yeah, there’s a lot more to that.
RI: The Walgreens example is a pretty interesting one. Obviously, they did not have Enron like issues legally, but you think of it as there have been so many examples in history where people just assumed it was a one decision stock.
And in this case, the dividend was a one decision dividend for so many people for so long, and, poof, then it happens.
Now on McDonald’s, I guess what you’re saying and it says a lot about any investor if they can stay within their framework but go out of their comfort zone at the same time. That seems like what you were willing to do with McDonald’s.
And I guess the only other thing I would say about that before we move on to, maybe one more name is it sounds like operational strength has never been an issue.
The biggest change at the company is they took the beef tallow out of those amazing French fries years ago. So, that, to me, based on, loving McDonald’s fries as a kid, it’s a little bit of a ding. But you know what? If it doesn’t hurt the stock price. Right?
BB: Yeah. We can, we can be okay with that.
RI: Yes. Okay. So, one more name, and then we’ll sum up here.
BB: Another example I’ll give, sure, is Lowe’s (LOW). So this is another company I own.
It’s a huge home improvement retailer, great brand recognition, prominent store locations, thousands and thousands of products. Business benefits from economies of scale, smaller rivals can’t really match the assortment or price of these products or how Lowe’s can kind of market them in the store.
Experience keeps getting better for consumers too as they invest in, you know, digital, omnichannel experience, just technology in general. So very much a built to last business that’s going to be around a long-time. You know, COVID has kind of lifted the market for DIY projects as a whole.
But during the pandemic, this was a pretty interesting one to research because, you know, you saw tens of thousands of stores across the US being forced to close, and there was just panic.
So this is kind of the classic setup, which you don’t really get very often. But I remember my business partner, Matt, and I in March, we were slammed working weekends, like, trying to get all this research out on all these companies, and Lowe’s is one that came up because the stock was just tanking. Like, the whole retail space was just tanking. There’s so much uncertainty. And so we decided, let’s just call up some of these Lowe’s stores. So we did.
RI: Some good old fashioned research analyst work right there.
BB: Well, it just took a minute. Right? And everyone we spoke to at Lowe’s was like, we are slammed. We’ve never been more busy.
So not only were they open, but they were just gushing with cash. I mean, everyone was going there to just, you know, load up on stuff for their homes. But the stock was down. I forget what it was. Maybe 50%, something wild. And those opportunities rarely ever come around, but that’s exactly, like, what you would love to swing at the fat pitch as a dividend investor where it’s a great company, nothing has changed with the long term outlook, but for reasons that don’t really matter, people are selling it off.
The dividend is safe. You’re locking in a high yield with good growth. So those are the types of opportunities that are the ones that you love to swing at. Of course, there’s plenty you swing and miss at as well, but you don’t need to hit everything when you’re building a portfolio.
RI: Right. And I just wrote down my little scratch pad here. I’d summarize that as if you’re going to be serious about dividend investing, do the work. That’s what I wrote down here. Do the work.
And there’s a lot of ways to do the work, and you don’t have to do it the same way as everybody else does. But having a philosophy, a process, a strategy, and then developing the technique as you go along, I think it’s kind of the path.
Is anything else that you would say, let’s say, speaking directly to either the tenured dividend investor that maybe doesn’t see some shifts that you’d see being, you know, sort of nose to the ground, and also for the younger aspiring, folks like, you did, for my son, you know, several, several years ago? Thank you.
BB: Yeah. I think it’s probably a balance between really sticking with what you know. You know, Buffett’s old circle of competence is really big.
I think sometimes there’s a temptation to buy the shiny new object, whether it’s, you know, covered call fund or something you may not really understand, which is, you know, dangerous if it doesn’t work out, but probably more dangerous if it does work out and you are more prone to chasing things.
You don’t have to make it harder than it needs to be. You know, one of the benefits of being a dividend investor is we don’t have to determine if Tesla (TSLA) is worth $3,000 a share or $30 or $0. We’re just trying to hit singles and doubles to use another sports analogy.
So figuring out when things are changing is difficult. I mean, the best professional investors are going to be wrong half of the time. It’s just that their winners do far much better than their losers do. So you have to give yourself a little grace in the process too and kind of listen to what the market is telling you sometimes.
There’s a lot of really, really smart people that are pricing these stocks. So if something looks cheap, you really got a question yourself, is it cheap for a reason and vice versa as well.
But, yeah, just knowing yourself, sticking true to what you feel like you understand that’s simple, and staying committed to a long-term plan, whether that’s asset allocation or just how you manage your portfolio of an approach that kind of works well for you.
For me, I kind of keep things pretty simple. So I like to build and maintain a portfolio that has around 20 to 30 stocks. I like to equal weight my positions, which recognizes that it’s very difficult to know what will perform best going forward.
I focus on companies that have safe or very safe dividend safety scores. I try and limit my sector exposure to no more than around 25%, 30% of the portfolio, not feeling forced to go in areas where I don’t really understand.
And when I buy a company, I’m hoping to hold this business forever. I only really look to sell if the position becomes uncomfortably large, a good problem to have, if I feel like the dividend safety profile has deteriorated beyond my comfort level, or if the long-term outlook seems like it has truly changed.
And across all those factors, it may sound like a scary list, but the 10-years or so I’ve been maintaining several portfolios like this, we’ve averaged maybe one to two trades per year. So it’s very much set it. You don’t forget it. You got to monitor it.
Stay on top of changes in those, dividend safety and long-term outlooks. But it’s a very simple strategy. Zero fees involved if you’re doing it yourself to maintain and kind of get peace of mind and not worry about what’s happening with the broader market. Your dividends will keep rising each year if you’re doing it this way and kind of staying on top of it.
RI: I guess it makes it so that when you actually do make portfolio changes with that low annual turnover rate that you just cited, when you make changes, they’re for real. You’re not doing it flippantly. You really put a lot of thought into it. And I think, you know, that, that says a lot. You know, I — and then also equal weighting, I think you make a really, really good point on that.
On the covered call, writing and other option infused strategies, it’s funny you mentioned that, because I’m about 30-years in on that, and I do write a lot about the growing basket of those available in the markets.
And it’s the same thing that you say about, sort of deep dive dividend investing, that there’s a lot of folks who are kind of like, they don’t know what they don’t know, and I think, you know, that’s something you and I have in common. We like to be constant educators, maybe to the point of annoyance sometimes in my case.
And also on Warren Buffett, I don’t know if you ever heard this, but, I think he’s the one who said, I have three trays on my desk, in, out, and too tough. And that too tough tray is really the one that investors have to put aside their ego and commit to, right? Like you say, don’t swing at every pitch.
BB: Yeah. I think that’s a huge part of the battle.
RI: Great. Anything else that you would like to leave the audience with, for now?
BB: Well, I think if you’ve been focused on dividends, the last two years or so has been a pretty tough time.
I mean, it’s really been a one, two punch of this almost a raging mania for AI and growth stocks. You know, stocks only go up, right? The market’s up almost 30% back to back years.
And so you have that going on in one hand, almost regardless of valuations at this point. There’s a lot of massive companies trading at pretty crazy multiples all on kind of hope that AI will usher in this new era of growth. It might, but how much and when?
Those are big questions that the bar has raised pretty high for. But it’s been hard if you’ve been committed to a dividend portfolio and you’ve seen, you know, all these growth focused investors, crypto investors, just enjoying these massive capital gains.
So that’s been going on and then, of course, the rise in interest rates, which is kind of moderating now and declining a little bit, but still elevated compared to where it was. That has also kind of reduced the appeal of bond like dividend stocks.
It’s hurt, in some cases, fundamentals for some of these companies that are more reliant on, you know, debt, capital intensive industries. So it’s really been a confluence of factors that has made it challenging, I think, to or I guess has challenged your commitment in some cases to this strategy.
But to those people that are kind of feeling frustrated by the last couple of years, you know, realize that this is this is not forever. Things can change quickly. Your goal is just to keep building that rising passive income stream, not to chase momentum, and that’s the world we’ve been living in. But it can change quickly.
I’ll leave you one last stat. So if you look back this summer, July 9th through August 5th, people were starting to worry like, oh, is the labor market coming apart? Does the Fed need to just step in and make some emergency rate cuts? The S&P 500 lost 7% during that time, and the biggest winners during the Fed’s rate hiking cycle became the biggest losers. The tech sector lost 16%, utilities, REITs, dividend, ETFs gained at least 5%.
Now I have no idea if that will continue or happen again. Maybe there’s a recession. Maybe AI doesn’t live up to the hype. But a lot of these companies look very attractively valued, compared to the broader tech heavy market.
So if you’re tempted to throw in the towel, realize this could be an indicator that a point of inflection is nearing. There’s just a lot of signs of just I don’t know if I’ll call it exuberance, but you look at the conference board, they do a regular survey of investors.
And consumers right now, there’s a record proportion that think stocks will be higher a year later from today, going back to the data in 1980s. So it’s a period of time that’s interesting in that everyone is kind of chasing capital appreciation.
Things can only go up. Fundamentals don’t really matter. They do matter in the long run, right? In the short-run, the market’s a voting machine. In the long-run, a weighing machine. And we’re playing the long game here.
So stick with it. It’ll be my final words of encouragement. Don’t worry about these short-term periods. Stay the course.
RI: I started managing money professionally in the 1990s, so I invested through the whole dotcom bubble. And you can’t tell me there aren’t some pretty stark similarities.
Also, one more Buffett quote because, you know, you can never have enough. The attitude I think you’re talking about investors and how ultimately these solid dividend companies, the reason they’re solid dividend companies is because they have sustainable operations, cash flow, or as Buffett would say, when the tide goes out, you can see who is swimming naked.
And we don’t know when that’s going to happen, but just the possibility that it could, it goes back to the old, sort of adviser mantra. I can’t help it as a former adviser. Risk tolerance and time horizon. That’s what everybody has to decide for themselves as a self-directed investor, if they don’t have a professional helping them through it.
And that’s why, I think, obviously Seeking Alpha and all the great insight there, and services like yours, will be their great educational tools, so that people can ultimately make the call themselves with nobody else around, with their own money and their own situation.
Well, Brian, thank you so much. This was a great experience to be able to speak to you in this format after speaking to you informally and otherwise, for the last decade. Thanks for all you do, and, thanks for the time today.
BB: Well, thanks again for having me on, Rob. It was great chatting, and I look forward to the next one.
RI: Alright. You can catch me on seekingalpha@sungardeninvestmentpublishing and the new investing group, Sungarden YARP Portfolio. Bye for now.