Money Saver and Strategies

 

The February edition of the Canadian Money Saver magazine has the usual interesting content for a DIY investor such as myself.

Matt from dividendstrategy.ca has an update article in the issue about Beating the TSX 2023/2024.

The 10 top Canadian companies/banks in dividend yield on the TSX. I hold all except AQN, Algonquin Power.

My approach is different than what the strategy suggests. Rather than buying all in equal amounts at the start of the year, I buy through out the year where I don't have plans to sell at the end of the year, I hold long term and continue to hold stocks that were listed on the BTSX in previous years.

For 2023, BTSX had a total return including dividend of 7.77%. Considering it was a year of Banks, utilities and telecoms lagging mainly due to the high interest rate set by the Bank of Canada ... not too shabby.

Over the long term, the strategy works as charted in the article while there are dividend increases along the way from the stocks listed.

For ETF fans, the magazine starts out it's issues with the performance of it's Model ETF Portfolio with a list of 14 ETFs. Since I'm a long term guy ... there is an additional article in the magazine about how they work the ETFs ... 5% weighting for each unless some are outperforming for awhile. 

They started with $100,000 on October 2013 and time certainly flies with 10 years later and a gain of 101.38%, for a total of $201,375.48. Impressive. Annualised yield of 7.09% for 2023

Those are two approaches to building cash dividends of the many plans out there. Personally, I'm more interested in holding individual stocks with an increasing yield over the years with no fees that "most" ETF managers will charge. 

An example is Manulife Financial, MFC with a recent 9.6% dividend increase which kicks in this month, which was listed for 2023. 

I find the Canadian Money Saver a good addition to the Blogs I read on my sidebar and other investing sites. There are a range of topics in each issue.

Watchlist Picking for February, 2024

 

Daylight Savings Time kicks in less than a month ... March 10th and I'm already looking forward to more daylight and heading into spring. Time to shop around for a new BBQ where mine is burnt out. Burgers and wieners sizzling where steaks are a luxury item these days unless on sale. Meanwhile grocers here are saying a freeze on prices is coming to an end? Ok, didn't know there was a price freeze where I'm paying more every month.

I'll need more dividend payments to keep up and on that subject, in the Lifeco sector; Manulife Financial (MFC) comes to mind with an ex-dividend date of February 27th and a pay date of March 19th. 

MFC is currently undervalued going by the current Graham Number. ($44) with a 4.80% yield and a 5 year dividend growth of 10%.

A stock I will add this month after "watching" it for awhile is Atco Limited (ACO-X), which I mentioned in my last post. Atco Ltd has a 5 year dividend growth of over 7% and with a 3% dividend increase for it's February 28th ex-dividend date, paid on the 31st of March.

I look for decent companies that are growing their dividends but as an investor with no insight to what goes in company boardrooms or a CEO's office, I can only go by what stats, news and history provides.

A good example of this is the release of a recent upsetting quarterly report by a top telecom company in Canada, BCE. That is still causing a stir, even getting the Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau miffed calling it a garbage decision over BCE's cutting of 4800 jobs plus other closures/selling. BCE increased it's dividend by 3.1%, while a minimum of a 5% increase was expected. 

BCE's bottom line could improve over the next couple quarters but at what morale cost are on some investor's mind.  The stock world can be cruel and unforgiving to investors at times while the underlying companies think about profit as they hand out layoff notices from time to time.

Meanwhile, long term yield investors see it as a stitch in time and look forward to future accumulating dividend payments with their holdings.