Towards the end of December, I penned "Only 1 Current Dividend Aristocrat Lost Investors Money This Decade". That company was Franklin Resources (BEN), a global investment management firm. The chart below details the performance of the 57 companies in the S&P 500 that had paid increasing dividends for the past 25 years through the publication of that article. Franklin Resources had returned -2% over that nearly ten-year period. After a modest rally into year-end, it ended the decade return -0.05% to investors, including reinvested dividends.
Source: Bloomberg; return data as of