New Year, new you, new sources of potential income to pore over! The changing of the calendar offers an opportunity for income-seeking investors to find attractive or overlooked dividend stocks to add to their portfolios.
If you need any reminder, a J.P. Morgan Asset Management report from 2013 reminds us that dividend stocks have run circles around their non-dividend-paying peers for decades. Companies that initiated and grew their payouts between 1972 and 2012 had an average annualized return of 9.5%, compared to just 1.6% for non-dividend payers over the same time frame. Dividend stocks are usually also time tested and profitable businesses that can easily contend with stock market corrections and short-term recessions.
Of course, the biggest challenge income investors face is finding the highest yield possible with the least amount of risk. The problem is that as yield rises, risk increases, too. That's why I've handpicked the following five high-yield stocks as those likeliest to make investors richer in 2020.