Dividends Stocks: The S&P Elite

BusinessWeek has a stock screen by Standard & Poor on it's website that selects the best dividend stocks. The screen looks at S&P Dividend Aristocrats companies that have boosted their payouts in each of the past 25 years along with a top S&P STAR rating. Dividends Stocks: The S&P Elite

We screened for those members of the Dividend Aristocrats—the full list of all such companies can be found here—that also have an S&P investment ranking of 4 STARS (buy) or 5 STARS (strong buy), suggesting expected out performance in the coming 12 months, and that have not cut dividends this year.

Average Yield Tops 4%
Looking beyond the Dividend Aristocrats to the broader S&P 500 index, S&P Senior Index Analyst Howard Silverblatt of S&P Index Services, which operates independently of S&P Equity Research, uncovered some interesting statistics.

Looking at Telecom Services, Utilities
Increasingly, investors are well advised to search for income-producing stocks outside of the financial-services sector. Silverblatt says the telecom-services sector has a dividend efficiency ratio (percentage of dividends divided by percentage of market value within the S&P 500) of 2.1—much higher than the 1.43 dividend efficiency ratio posted by the financials. The utilities sector also has a high dividend efficiency ratio.

Twenty-eight names are featured on the screen, with all 10 S&P sectors represented.

Company (Ticker)
Abbott Laboratories (ABT)
Aflac (AFL)
Air Products & Chemicals (APD)
Automatic Data Processing (ADP)
BB&T (BBT)
Becton, Dickinson (BDX)
Century Telephone (CTL)
Chubb (CB)
Coca-Cola (KO)
C.R. Bard (BCR)
Emerson Electric (EMR)
ExxonMobil (XOM)
Family Dollar Stores (FDO)
Johnson & Johnson (JNJ)
Johnson Controls (JCI)
Kimberly-Clark (KMB)
McDonald's (MCD)
Nucor (NUE)
PepsiCo (PEP)
PPG (PPG)
Procter & Gamble (PG)
Questar (STR)
Sigma-Aldrich (SIAL)
Stanley Works (SWK)
3M (MMM)
VF Corp. (VFC)
Wal-Mart Stores (WMT)
W.W. Grainger (GWW)

Disclosure: The Div Guy own shares of ABT, XOM, JNJ, PEP and PG at the time of this post.

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