Some years back I used to enjoy reading a research report that was published periodically by Credit Suisse called “Better than Bonds”. The concept of the report was fairly straight forward as I remember it. At the time, dividend yields on many high quality stocks were the same as or greater than the yields on the same bonds. Therefore, if an investor was willing to buy a portfolio of the corporate debt of these financially sound companies, why not just buy the same stocks

It’s been well publicized that the month of January 2016 was not the worst January in history for US equities - it was the second worst. The interesting thing though, is how vocal the perma bear community has become - after the fact. There are many bloggers out there who have been ‘telling us so’ since 2009 and they seem to be getting louder after the recent markdown. Some of the prognostications that we have read lately call for a bear market that will dwarf the 2007 to 2

Nobody can predict the future with absolute certainty – nobody. However, in this business, we deal in probabilities, then we monitor and adjust. Therefore the astute analyst should be able to explain the situation on the ground and form an educated opinion about the future. The chart above shows the return of the Dow Jones US Value Index relative to the return of the Dow Jones US Growth Index. When the line in the top pane is rising then the value index is outperforming t

If you think dividends are boring, think again. According to Stocks for the Long Run, by Jeremy Siegel, about two thirds of the real (inflation-adjusted) returns from U.S. Stocks from 1871 to 1996 were attributable to dividends, and about one third of the (real) gains were attributable to capital appreciation. Please reread that last sentence. Dividends have historically provided more profit to investors than capital gains. Now don’t get me wrong, I want my stocks to go u