Dividend stocks for Growth Investors

Don't gamble; take all your savings and buy some good stock and hold it till it goes up, then sell it. 

If it don't go up, don't by it. 

Will Rogers

For many investors, current income is not an important consideration in building their portfolios. They may have sufficient income from other sources, including employment. For them, building and growing the overall value of their portfolios may be the primary focus of their efforts. Should these “growth investors” concern themselves at all with a strategy built around investing in dividend paying securities?

One of the classic advantages of dividends is their large contribution to the long-term performance that has made stocks so attractive to investors. (About 50% of the returns of your stocks are contributed by dividends.) Reinvesting those dividends can compound the growth of a portfolio. The attraction dividend-paying stocks hold for investors looking for a steady and rising stream of income to support their lifestyles is pretty clear.

The goal of a growth investor, is to increase the overall size of the portfolio so that it will be large enough to meet a future need. That need may be a lump sum to pay for college expenses, or a much larger account from which to draw retirement income. In either case, the object of the game is to make the pot of money bigger in the time available. The key to winning the game lies in understanding that total return is what counts.

Total return is made up of two parts: price appreciation and income. A security that goes up in price by 5% and pays 5% in income adds as much to the financial pot as one that goes up by 10% in value, but pays no income. Still, like the customer who insists on having his pizza cut into 6 slices because he doesn’t think he can eat eight, some investors want their returns delivered only as appreciation.

Stocks that pay dividends do tend to be more mature companies, with characteristically slower growth rates. This is sometimes taken to mean they have low total-return prospects. More accurately, they offer a different path to total return, and that path can lead to an excellent outcome. Flashy price gains are exciting; steady and reliable income can seem boring by comparison. To the extend those flashy gains come at the expense of increased volatility in annual returns, chasing them could lead you down the road to disaster.