General

The Portfolio for the Ages came to life with the acquisition of FMCB, a little-known Dividend King, on July 18, 2022. There are now 15 positions covering all 11 sectors and one can see the performance and portfolio characteristics at the relevant menu links¹.

Save the stock price performance of TDS, the portfolio’s performance has been a disappointment. I have to emphasize that it is TDS’s price performance that has been phenomenal, as its business performance has been the worst of any of the holdings. And if that doesn’t tell you something about investing in the short term, I’m not sure what does. I am deliberately passing on the opportunity to compare the Royal Dividends portfolio performance to that of SPX or NOBL at this time, in order to stress the importance of dividend accumulation.

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Dividend ProgressRead More »

Update: Later, on the same day as the original post, I asked Bing what ABBV’s current dividend is, and received the correct answer of $1.48 per share. Immediately, I wondered why Bing nailed it this time. Then, I became aware that my setting for Bing was ‘More Creative’ (as opposed to ‘More Balanced’ or ‘More Precise’). This likely explains the parallel universe that I accidentally stepped into earlier that day. It doesn’t explain why it waited until I was a few iterations deep when it decided to get ‘creative’. Why didn’t it just respond with ‘chicken‘? That’s very creative. And why get creative with what is already historical fact? Should I have expected that? Shouldn’t ‘creativity’ be used in less factual arenas, like dreams or forecasts or emotional discussion? Do we need to play around with irrefutable historical fact? I still think the previously unspoken, yet implied warning about AI applies; use multiple sources to verify information provided to you, particularly if from a source you have not used previously. My main source for all things related to dividends, earnings, and fair valuation, is Sure Dividend. When I need additional detail, I venture out into other sources such as Yahoo! Finance, CFRA reports, and TD Ameritrade, and make sure that I reconcile back to my control totals. This fruitless venture into AI as detailed below was an effort to get quarterly dividends that would tie back to the yearly dividends easily obtained from the latest ABBV report available through my Sure Dividend membership. No one source is perfect, but Sure Dividend aims to be. Be careful out there, humans.

I am writing on September 15, 2023. I just completed a rather surreal chat with the AI-powered, Microsoft Bing add-on available in the Microsoft Edge browser. Life may never be the same.

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More Human than HumanRead More »

I’d like to think Blaze Bayley came up with the title I chose for this post, but there are historians who would beg to differ. In his song ‘The Brave‘, we have the lines:

Fortune favours¹ the brave
Risking it all again and again
Fortune favours the brave
Fall after fall they climb up again

Was he singing about the stock market?

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Fortune Favors the BraveRead More »

When is the last time you thought about linseed? Have you even seen that word in print lately? Did you know that linseed and flaxseed are the same thing? The seeds come from the common flax plant (linum usitatissimum) and if you’re crushing or pressing the seeds for human consumption in the form of fiber or oil, we tend to call it flaxseed. When the seeds are processed for the purposes of making furniture polish, paints, or cloth (linen…now we’re seeing things oh so clearly) then linseed is the more common term. Maybe. The truth is the terms are interchangeable and the use in the UK differs from American English.

So, you likely know that if you take a spoonful of flaxseeds and grind them up you have a small amount of flax meal you can add to a smoothie or baked goods for extra nutrition. Or you can add the whole seeds directly to some dough for a tasty multigrain bread. But do you know what you get if you scale your production way up and process tons and tons of linseed? You get rich.

There’s a company that has been crushing linseed for over a hundred years and on January 26, 2023, they announced a dividend increase that represents 50 consecutive years of annual increases in their dividend, making them a Dividend King.

All hail Archer-Daniels-Midland Co!

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Coronation! [ADM]Read More »

The stock market was down this week, a small correction from an otherwise good, multi-week run-up. In fact, the S&P 500 is up 13.25% YTD through June 23, 2023 (ignoring dividends). You’d never know it by looking at the Portfolio for the Ages. But let’s not look at the Royal Dividends portfolio just yet. Instead, let’s take a look at the seven largest companies by weight in the S&P 500.

Surprised? These seven companies, effectively 1.4% of the number of companies¹ in the index, represent a whopping 27.9% by weight. The S&P 500 Index is market capitalization weighted and is heavily influenced by these overpriced juggernauts. The weighted average YTD price return of the magnificent seven is an enormous 68.7%. This means the remaining 493 companies are delivering a wonderful -8.27% YTD. Taking dividends into account would improve this gap ever so slightly, but let’s get real here – the S&P 500 in no way represents the broader equity market.

Unless you have decent exposure to the big seven, the market has been garbage.

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A Royal MessRead More »

In 1940, just out of college, a young fella by the name of Sam Walton joins JC Penney’s management trainee program. Anticipating being drafted into the military, Sam leaves JC Penney after just 18 months. Sure enough, he performs his patriotic duties during WWII and in 1945 he combines his own military earnings with a $20,000 loan from his father-in-law and he buys a Ben Franklin variety store in Newport, Arkansas. About 5 years later, the expensive lease runs out and he cannot negotiate a new one. So, he opens his own franchise Walton’s Five and Dime in Bentonville, Arkansas.

A dozen or so years later, in 1962, Sam Walton launches the Wal-Mart Discount City store. Not in Discount City, but in Rogers, Arkansas. The rest, as they say, is history.

Let’s face it, we’ve all been in one. Some of us have worked in one. None of us ever want to be in one. But they have what we need at a good price.

On February 21, 2023, they announced a dividend increase that represents 50 consecutive years of annual increases in their dividend, making them a Dividend King.

All hail Walmart Inc!

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Coronation! [WMT]Read More »

I stumbled upon something disturbing while assembling this week’s Empire from which the Top Ten is built. When selecting at least five tickers from each sector¹, I noticed a new ticker in the five stocks that comprise the Consumer Discretionary component of the Empire. Since the Empire was first established, the Consumer Discretionary offerings have been as follows:

Ticker	Years
GPC	66
LOW	60
LEG	51
VFC	50
MCD	47

VF Corportation [VFC] suddenly disappeared and Sonoco Products Co [SON] founds its way onto the list.

Ticker	Years
GPC	66
LOW	60
LEG	51
MCD	47
SON	40

The Sure Dividend Research Database now has zero years associated with VFC. I was really just hoping that the database had been populated with a faulty link. Nope. VFC, a newly crowned Dividend King, has reduced its dividend. And folks, do you know what this means?

VF Corporation has abdicated the throne!

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Abdication [VFC]Read More »

In 1860, Henry Varnum Poor publishes “History of the Railroads and Canals of the United States“, which provided investors with data on the growing railroad industry. It ignited what today might be better known as the use of investment analytics. Poor began working for the government with the Pacific Union Railroad, and in 1868, Poor’s Publishing puts out “Manual of the Railroads of the United States”. This publication gave investors current information on railroad performance on which they could make decisions. You have the “Poor’s” part of where I’m going, and you have the railroad part. But here’s another, separate, tale out of yesteryear.

In 1906, Luther Lee Blake founds the Standard Statistics Bureau which provided investors with current information on non-railroad industrials on index cards. Now, you have the “Standard” part of the name and the non-railroad side of things too. The history is out there for all to see, but let’s just say at some point, these services and others came together under the name Standard and Poor’s to create the behemoth of investor analytics that provides every investor on the globe with valuable real-time information on which decisions are made. I mean for crying out loud, they are the S&P behind the S&P 500 Index. You can invest in them. Oh, and I almost forgot, on January 25, 2023, they announced a dividend increase that represents 50 consecutive years of annual increases in their dividend, making them a Dividend King.

All hail S&P Global Inc!

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Coronation! [SPGI]Read More »

Royal Dividends launched on July 13, 2022, and its first acquisition was made on July 18, 2022. After the 11th stock was added to the portfolio, I published a post titled ‘Going Forward’ and laid out a plan for continued investment in the ‘Portfolio for the Ages’. Here I present an updated version of the investment plan going forward. There are no big changes only small refinements.

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Going Forward 2.0Read More »

Ordinarily, I update the Performance page once a week, the evening after the latest investment. Last night was the first time I could recall seeing a positive return since September 26, 2022, when the portfolio reached its initial maturity level of 11 positions, one stock from each sector. This is obviously good news. However, investors do like a yard stick, a way of measuring whether or not this is good performance or not. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to compare the performance of this portfolio to that of an index for multiple reasons which will be explained.

Yet, the thirst for comparison remains and so I search for a suitable benchmark.

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Performance UpdateRead More »