Dividend Investing Quotes

The best dividends on the labor invested have invariably come from seeking more knowledge rather than more power.” Signed Wilbur and Orville Wright, March 12, 1906.

Just as life has no quick fix; transformation lacks a flick-switch approach as well. Investing in a better version of yourself will take time but pay you rich dividends as well.

I mean … we’d just passed our one-year dating anniversary. I figured I was a sort of long-term investment for her. She hoped I would pay dividends eventually; if I died now, she would’ve put up with all my annoying qualities for nothing.

You will invest in something as you live your life, so make sure it is something that will pay dividends you will enjoy.

An investment in self-development pays the highest dividends.

Many people object to “wasting money in space” yet have no idea how much is actually spent on space exploration. The CSA’s budget, for instance, is less than the amount Canadians spend on Halloween candy every year, and most of it goes toward things like developing telecommunications satellites and radar systems to provide data for weather and air quality forecasts, environmental monitoring and climate change studies. Similarly, NASA’s budget is not spent in space but right here on Earth, where it’s invested in American businesses and universities, and where it also pays dividends, creating new jobs, new technologies and even whole new industries.

I view investing as a method of purchasing assets to gain profit in the form of reasonably predictable income (dividends, interest, or rentals) and /or appreciation over the long term.

She grinned, a silty grin. 'You were my two dividends, yes? Don't you forget that.' Then she sighed, took a deep breath, and said, 'But what an investment. My life.

Performance of management should be measured by potential to stay in business, to protect investment, to ensure future dividends and jobs through improvement of product and service for the future, not by the quarterly dividend.

Invest in love to earn dividends of happiness.

The true investor . . . will do better if he forgets about the stock market and pays attention to his dividend returns and to the operating results of his companies.

Be willing for purpose; it pays huge returns on investment. And along the journey, those who dis your willing sacrifice(s) will ponder their own foolishness.

I believe that higher wages to men who respect their employers and are happy and contented are a good investment, yielding, indeed, big dividends. The

At Mayflower-Plymouth, we believe that nature has a multitude of lessons to learn about capital. We also believe that to invest wisely for the long term, one must truly and deeply understand business.

The concept of ‘spending’ is problematic. When we are functioning with intention and wisdom, the only thing we really do with money is invest. There are small investments, and big investments. There are good investments and bad investments…The ROI we get for some investments is a product or service - the groceries in exchange for money, or the the car wash in exchange for money. And the ROI we get for other investments may be additional money in the form of interest or dividends, while the ROI in other cases is just a sense of fulfillment after maybe giving to charity or buying a gift for your spouse, or paying for your kids tuition, or creating art. When we look at it from this perspective, we get rid of the expectation that sending money out is a loss, and we replace it with an expectation that sending money out will always result in an ROI of some kind. Everything is an investment when we act with intention and wisdom.

Wisdom is really the key to wealth. With great wisdom, comes great wealth and success. Rather than pursuing wealth, pursue wisdom. The aggressive pursuit of wealth can lead to disappointment. Wisdom is defined as the quality of having experience, and being able to discern or judge what is true, right, or lasting. Wisdom is basically the practical application of knowledge. Rich people have small TVs and big libraries, and poor people have small libraries and big TVs. Become completely focused on one subject and study the subject for a long period of time. Don't skip around from one subject to the next. The problem is generally not money. Jesus taught that the problem was attachment to possessions and dependence on money rather than dependence on God. Those who love people, acquire wealth so they can give generously. After all, money feeds, shelters, and clothes people. They key is to work extremely hard for a short period of time (1-5 years), create abundant wealth, and then make money work hard for you through wise investments that yield a passive income for life. Don't let the opinions of the average man sway you. Dream, and he thinks you're crazy. Succeed, and he thinks you're lucky. Acquire wealth, and he thinks you're greedy. Pay no attention. He simply doesn't understand. Failure is success if we learn from it. Continuing failure eventually leads to success. Those who dare to fail miserably can achieve greatly. Whenever you pursue a goal, it should be with complete focus. This means no interruptions. Only when one loves his career and is skilled at it can he truly succeed. Never rush into an investment without prior research and deliberation. With preferred shares, investors are guaranteed a dividend forever, while common stocks have variable dividends. Some regions with very low or no income taxes include the following: Nevada, Texas, Wyoming, Delaware, South Dakota, Cyprus, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Panama, San Marino, Seychelles, Isle of Man, Channel Islands, Curaçao, Bahamas, British Virgin Islands, Brunei, Monaco, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Bermuda, Kuwait, Oman, Andorra, Cayman Islands, Belize, Vanuatu, and Campione d'Italia. There is only one God who is infinite and supreme above all things. Do not replace that infinite one with finite idols. As frustrated as you may feel due to your life circumstances, do not vent it by cursing God or unnecessarily uttering his name. Greed leads to poverty. Greed inclines people to act impulsively in hopes of gaining more. The benefit of giving to the poor is so great that a beggar is actually doing the giver a favor by allowing the person to give. The more I give away, the more that comes back. Earn as much as you can. Save as much as you can. Invest as much as you can. Give as much as you can.

I have found that there is romance in housework: and charm in it; and whimsy and humor without end. I have found that the housewife works hard, of course–but likes it. Most people who amount to anything do work hard, at whatever their job happens to be. The housewife’s job is home-making, and she is, in fact, ‘making the best of it’; making the best of it by bringing patience and loving care to her work; sympathy and understanding to her family; making the best of it by seeing all the fun in the day’s incidents and human relationships. The housewife realizes that home-making is an investment in happiness. It pays everyone enormous dividends. There are huge compensations for the actual labor involved… There are unhappy housewives, of course. But there are unhappy stenographers and editresses and concert singers. The housewife whose songs I sing as I go about my work, is the one who likes her job (pp. 6-7). From Songs of a Housewife: Poems by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

If love and kindness is life's investment, then joy and happiness will be life's profit and dividend.

Love is the only investment that gives dividends without failure.

Things outside are just a projection from the DVD playing inside you. The time you invest for knowing your inner self will pay dividends outside.

Hope, once invested in, always pays dividends.

Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death. The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.

As a result, studies have found we can reap immediate intellectual and emotional dividends from investing in exercise and sleep, or even from taking a moment to breathe deeply, smile broadly, and stand a little taller. In

Basically, CEOs have five essential choices for deploying capital—investing in existing operations, acquiring other businesses, issuing dividends, paying down debt, or repurchasing stock—and three alternatives for raising it—tapping internal cash flow, issuing debt, or raising equity. Think of these options collectively as a tool kit. Over the long term, returns for shareholders will be determined largely by the decisions a CEO makes in choosing which tools to use (and which to avoid) among these various options. Stated simply, two companies with identical operating results and different approaches to allocating capital will derive two very different long-term outcomes for shareholders.

The best dividends on the labor invested,” they said, “have invariably come from seeking more knowledge rather than more power.

When we invest in active listening, the dividend is an expanded capacity for compassion.

But wouldn’t people, his clients, realize? When there was no actual money in the account?” “How?” “When they asked for it.” “But people don’t,” she said. “They give it to their investment dealer, and at best they cash in the dividends or take the profits. But the capital remains in the account. Weren’t you ever told by your parents never to touch the capital?” “No. I was told not to touch my brother’s bike.

Reliability investing requires finding companies trading below their inherent worth--stocks with strong fundamentals including earnings, dividends, book value, and cash flow selling at bargain prices give their quality.

More generally, confidence that an investment of labor and resources could claim its reward-whether at harvest time or when dividends were issued years later-has been crucial to the economic efforts which create national prosperity.

Truth telling is an investment we must make in relationships—whether personal or professional. It takes a lot of time and thought, and sometimes, courage. However, there is probably not another investment of time that pays a greater dividend when done well.

SHAREHOLDERS’ EQUITY has two components: CAPITAL STOCK: The original amount of money the owners contributed as their investment in the stock of the company. RETAINED EARNINGS: All the earnings of the company that have been retained, that is, not paid out as dividends to owners.

Basically, CEOs have five essential choices for deploying capital—investing in existing operations, acquiring other businesses, issuing dividends, paying down debt, or repurchasing stock—and three alternatives for raising it—tapping internal cash flow, issuing debt, or raising equity.

Apple raised $17 billion in a bond offering in 2013. Not to invest in new products or business lines, but to pay a dividend to stockholders. The company is awash with cash, but much of that money is overseas, and there would be a tax charge if it were repatriated to the USA. For many other companies, the tax-favoured status of debt relative to equity encourages financial engineering. Most large multinational companies have corporate and financial structures of mind-blowing complexity. The mechanics of these arrangements, which are mainly directed at tax avoidance or regulatory arbitrage, are understood by only a handful of specialists. Much of the securities issuance undertaken by Goldman Sachs was not ‘helping companies to grow’ but represented financial engineering of the kind undertaken at Apple. What

A network functions precisely because there’s recognition of mutual need. There’s an implicit understanding that investing time and energy in building personal relationships with the right people will pay dividends. The majority of “one percenters” are in that top stratum because they understand this dynamic—because, in fact, they themselves used the power of their network of contacts and friends to arrive at their present station.

Knowledge is in some ways the most important (though intangible) capital of a software engineering organization, and sharing of that knowledge is crucial for making an organization resilient and redundant in the face of change. A culture that promotes open and honest knowledge sharing distributes that knowledge efficiently across the organization and allows that organization to scale over time. In most cases, investments into easier knowledge sharing reap manyfold dividends over the life of a company.

In forests – Seeds are planted in the soil (capital) and become trees that shed leaves as they grow. Those shedded leaves become added capital to the soil (dividends/yields). The tree also provides a home for other life forms which return capital to the soil. Upon the death of the tree, it’s entire body becomes capital as it is returned to the soil. In this cycle, every tree is an investment which results in the long term accumulation of soil (capital) over time. As the soil grows, it becomes better able to invest in future trees and host future forests. And the yield of them all collectively becomes greater and greater as the capital accumulates. In fact, everything in a natural ecosystem both is capital and exists in service to capital. This duality of capital in natural ecosystems is why capital in natural ecosystems is able to compound and multiply so well. So when it comes to investing - managing portfolios, we apply this duality of capital perspective and pair it with our stewardship identity, which allows us to grow portfolios and maximize wealth.

When we talk about building wealth, we ought to refer to one’s entire net worth, meaning the sum of savings and total assets, minus all debt. If you have $50,000 in your TSP and in other savings accounts, but owe $50,000 on credit cards, a car or two, and student loans, have you really built up any “wealth”? While you have saved up a tidy sum in the TSP and in savings accounts, since you owe so much to creditors, your total net worth in this scenario is actually zero.* Consider also that, instead of receiving interest and dividend payments in the TSP, each of your debts is charging you interest—and in many cases considerable interest.

Studies of the effects of education confirm that educated people really are more enlightened. They are less racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, and authoritarian. They place a higher value on imagination, independence, and free speech. They are more likely to vote, volunteer, express political views, and belong to civic associations such as unions, political parties, and religious and community organizations. They are also likelier to trust their fellow citizens, a prime ingredient of the precious elixir called social capital which gives people the confidence to contract, invest, and obey the law without fearing that they are chumps who will be shafted by everyone else. For all these reasons, the growth of education and its first dividend, literacy is a flagship of human progress.

I have found it frustrating at times that so few people know what the space program does and, as a result, are unaware that they benefit from it. Many people object to “wasting money in space” yet have no idea how much is actually spent on space exploration. The CSA’s budget, for instance, is less than the amount Canadians spend on Halloween candy every year, and most of it goes toward things like developing telecommunications satellites and radar systems to provide data for weather and air quality forecasts, environmental monitoring and climate change studies. Similarly, NASA’s budget is not spent in space but right here on Earth, where it’s invested in American businesses and universities, and where it also pays dividends, creating new jobs, new technologies and even whole new industries. The

Each one, then, should love his life, even though it be not very attractive, for it is the only life. It is a boon that will never return and that each person should tend and enjoy with care; it is one's capital, large or small, and can not be treated as an investment like those whose dividends are payable through eternity. Life is an annuity; nothing is more certain than that. So that all efforts are to be respected that tend to ameliorate the tenure of this perishable possession which, at the end of every day, has already lost a little of its value. Eternity, the bait by which simple folk are still lured, is not situated beyond life, but in life itself, and is divided among all men, all creatures. Each of us holds but a small portion of it, but that share is so precious that it suffices to enrich the poorest. Let us then take the bitter and the sweet in confidence, and when the fall of the days seems to whirl about us, let us remember that dusk is also dawn.

The current crisis has led to renewed discussions about a universal basic income, whereby all citizens receive an equal regular payment from the government, regardless of whether they work. The idea behind this policy is a good one, but the narrative would be problematic. Since a universal basic income is seen as a handout, it perpetuates the false notion that the private sector is the sole creator, not a co-creator, of wealth in the economy and that the public sector is merely a toll collector, siphoning off profits and distributing them as charity. A better alternative is a citizen’s dividend. Under this policy, the government takes a percentage of the wealth created with government investments, puts that money in a fund, and then shares the proceeds with the people. The idea is to directly reward citizens with a share of the wealth they have created. Alaska, for example, has distributed oil revenues to residents through an annual dividend from its Permanent Fund since 1982.

Recognizing how most great fortunes had been built up in predatory ways, through usury, war lending and political insider dealings to grab the Commons and carve out burdensome monopoly privileges led to a popular view of financial magnates, landlords and hereditary ruling elite as parasitic by the 19th century, epitomized by the French anarchist Proudhon’s slogan “Property as theft.” Instead of creating a mutually beneficial symbiosis with the economy of production and consumption, today’s financial parasitism siphons off income needed to invest and grow. Bankers and bondholders desiccate the host economy by extracting revenue to pay interest and dividends. Repaying a loan – amortizing or “killing” it – shrinks the host. Like the word amortization, mortgage (“dead hand” of past claims for payment) contains the root mort, “death.” A financialized economy becomes a mortuary when the host economy becomes a meal for the financial free luncher that takes interest, fees and other charges without contributing to production.

Statisticians say that stocks with healthy dividends slightly outperform the market averages, especially on a risk-adjusted basis. On average, high-yielding stocks have lower price/earnings ratios and skew toward relatively stable industries. Stripping out these factors, generous dividends alone don’t seem to help performance. So, if you need or like income, I’d say go for it. Invest in a company that pays high dividends. Just be sure that you are favoring stocks with low P/Es in stable industries. For good measure, look for earnings in excess of dividends, ample free cash flow, and stable proportions of debt and equity. Also look for companies in which the number of shares outstanding isn’t rising rapidly. To put a finer point on income stocks to skip, reverse those criteria. I wouldn’t buy a stock for its dividend if the payout wasn’t well covered by earnings and free cash flow. Real estate investment trusts, master limited partnerships, and royalty trusts often trade on their yield rather than their asset value. In some of those cases, analysts disagree about the economic meaning of depreciation and depletion—in particular, whether those items are akin to earnings or not. Without looking at the specific situation, I couldn’t judge whether the per share asset base was shrinking over time or whether generally accepted accounting principles accounting was too conservative. If I see a high-yielder with swiftly rising share counts and debt levels, I assume the worst.

So much changes when you get an education! You unlearn dangerous superstitions, such as that leaders rule by divine right, or that people who don’t look like you are less than human. You learn that there are other cultures that are as tied to their ways of life as you are to yours, and for no better or worse reason. You learn that charismatic saviors have led their countries to disaster. You learn that your own convictions, no matter how heartfelt or popular, may be mistaken. You learn that there are better and worse ways to live, and that other people and other cultures may know things that you don’t. Not least, you learn that there are ways of resolving conflicts without violence. All these epiphanies militate against knuckling under the rule of an autocrat or joining a crusade to subdue and kill your neighbors. Of course, none of this wisdom is guaranteed, particularly when authorities promulgate their own dogmas, alternative facts, and conspiracy theories—and, in a backhanded compliment to the power of knowledge, stifle the people and ideas that might discredit them. Studies of the effects of education confirm that educated people really are more enlightened. They are less racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, and authoritarian.10 They place a higher value on imagination, independence, and free speech.11 They are more likely to vote, volunteer, express political views, and belong to civic associations such as unions, political parties, and religious and community organizations.12 They are also likelier to trust their fellow citizens—a prime ingredient of the precious elixir called social capital which gives people the confidence to contract, invest, and obey the law without fearing that they are chumps who will be shafted by everyone else.13 For all these reasons, the growth of education—and its first dividend, literacy—is a flagship of human progress.

Finally, here’s the great news: Prayer covers a multitude of sins. You don’t have to do everything right as a parent, but there is one thing you cannot afford to get wrong. That one thing is prayer. You’ll never be a perfect parent, but you can be a praying parent. Prayer is your highest privilege as a parent. There is nothing you can do that will have a higher return on investment. In fact, the dividends are eternal.

Shareholders in the biggest US companies stand to receive a record $1tn in cash this year, as blue-chips’ concerns over the global economic outlook has diverted cash away from investment and is driving a boom in buybacks and dividends.

An investment in education pays the best dividends that last for generations.

A friendship is an investment that can yield great dividends over the long run. — Julie Durham —

A friendship is an investment that can yield great dividends over the long run. — Julie Durham

The point is that market returns are determined by both investment factors—the fundamentals of the initial dividend yield on stocks plus the rate at which their earnings grow—and by speculative factors— the change in the price that investors will pay for each $1 of corporate earnings.

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Whether appropriate or not, the term “value investing” is widely used. Typically, it connotes the purchase of stocks having attributes such as a low ratio of price to book value, a low price-earnings ratio, or a high dividend yield. Unfortunately, such characteristics, even if they appear in combination, are far from determinative as to whether an investor is indeed buying something for what it is worth and is therefore truly operating on the principle of obtaining value in his investments.

The pressure on life businesses and the capital fears prompted by the 2008 crisis have prompted the industry to build bigger capital cushions and cut costs. This has left insurers in a relatively good position. Investors have enjoyed decent dividends with payouts increasing by a cumulative 70% since 2009, according to FactSet. For shareholders, the risks to returns from life insurance have, so far, been balanced by earnings from nonlife insurance and asset management. Germany’s Allianz has U.S. bond house Pacific Investment Management Co. and nonlife insurance businesses, like property and casualty cover, around the world. Pimco has done well as interest rates declined and bond prices rose, but is expected to suffer once rates rise again—especially since founder Bill Gross walked out. France’s Axa similarly has global nonlife businesses and a large investment manager. However, these businesses ultimately will suffer from low investment returns. In nonlife, insurers can combat this with tougher underwriting standards. But demand for property-type insurance also suffers in a slower economy. Allianz has the lowest financial leverage of the big-three eurozone life insurers, and so has more flexibility to look for higher returns abroad. It also has a substantial general insurance business in the U.S., where rates should head higher sooner, and a higher expected dividend yield than France’s Axa or Italy’s Generali for this year and next.

You don’t have to do everything right as a parent, but there is one thing you cannot afford to get wrong. That one thing is prayer. You’ll never be a perfect parent, but you can be a praying parent. Prayer is your highest privilege as a parent. There is nothing you can do that will have a higher return on investment. In fact, the dividends are eternal. Prayer turns ordinary parents into prophets who shape the destinies of their children, grandchildren, and every generation that follows.

Rule 1: A rational investor should be willing to pay a higher price for a share the larger the growth rate of dividends and earnings.

Security Analysis” by Benjamin Graham, “The Single Best Investment” by Lowell Miller, “The Snowball Effect” by Timothy J McIntosh, “Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders” by Warren Buffett and Max Olson, “The Ultimate Dividend Playbook: Income, Insight and Independence for Today’s Investor” by Morningstar and Josh Peters.

Few Can Stick with 100% Stocks Long-Term Let's say you invested $100,000 into the S&P 500 in January 2007 then slipped into a coma for ten years. When you woke up, you would have been delighted to see your money at $195,000. If you had remained conscious, you would have watched your account value cut in half by May of 2009 . Would you have been able to watch your account fall by 50% and still held on? Or would you have panicked and sold at the bottom?

To summarize, a great business will show the following characteristics in its financial statements: Earnings show a smooth upward trend Consistent return on equity (ROE) greater than 20% Consistent return on total capital (ROTC) greater than 15% Long-term debt less than 4 times earnings Pays a dividend and/or buys back stock

Over the past thirty years the orthodox view that the maximisation of shareholder value would lead to the strongest economic performance has come to dominate business theory and practice, in the US and UK in particular.42 But for most of capitalism’s history, and in many other countries, firms have not been organised primarily as vehicles for the short-term profit maximisation of footloose shareholders and the remuneration of their senior executives. Companies in Germany, Scandinavia and Japan, for example, are structured both in company law and corporate culture as institutions accountable to a wider set of stakeholders, including their employees, with long-term production and profitability their primary mission. They are equally capitalist, but their behaviour is different. Firms with this kind of model typically invest more in innovation than their counterparts focused on short-term shareholder value maximisation; their executives are paid smaller multiples of their average employees’ salaries; they tend to retain for investment a greater share of earnings relative to the payment of dividends; and their shares are held on average for longer by their owners. And the evidence suggests that while their short-term profitability may (in some cases) be lower, over the long term they tend to generate stronger growth.43 For public policy, this makes attention to corporate ownership, governance and managerial incentive structures a crucial field for the improvement of economic performance. In short, markets are not idealised abstractions, but concrete and differentiated outcomes arising from different circumstances.

The best dividends on labor invested have invariably come from seeking more knowledge rather than more power.

stock’s value at any given time depends on how much another buyer is willing to pay for a share of that company’s stock, and how much the seller is willing to accept. On one hand, if the outlook for the company is good or improving, buyers might be willing to pay more than you paid for your share of stock, and if you sold it at the higher price, you’d make a profit. On the other hand, if you had to sell at a time when the price of the stock was lower than you paid, you’d lose money. Investors who decide to hold their shares of stock, rather than sell them, expect to profit from the dividends the company pays them from time to time, and/or from the increase in the value of their stock shares as the company (they hope) grows and prospers.

This is the last chapter of the book, but it is the beginning of your journey in becoming a super hero. Super heroes possess extraordinary abilities and skills that leave the average human jealous, speechless, and in awe. They also have the uncanny ability to stay calm, cool, and collected in the face of danger, while everybody else is panicking. While doing their normal day activities they might also blend in with the crowd and not stand out at all. But when duty calls, they can switch into super hero mode as fast as lightning.

Selling problems is, in fact, the investment that pays long-term dividends by making people more ready for particular organizational transitions—and for a world of continuous change in general.

Between 2003 and 2012, S&P 500 companies spent 91 percent of their earnings on buybacks and dividends for shareholders. That leaves 9 percent to invest across the entire company, in everything from research and development to worker wages.

Good character is the best insurance that pays good dividends than any insurance covers in the world. Preserve it!

As the head of International Match, Ivar debited that amount from the company’s cash and replaced it with a credit to Continental Investment Corporation in the same amount. Suddenly, International Match’s primary asset was an IOU from Continental instead of cash. Then, without the Americans seeming to care or even notice, Ivar wired $12,244,792 – all of the remaining proceeds from the International Match gold debenture issue, one of the largest American securities issues in years – to Continental’s account in Vaduz. Ivar was no Charles Ponzi. He wasn’t going to abscond with the money. He just wanted the flexibility to use the funds as he pleased, and to buy time if things didn’t go as planned. In a bad year, he could fudge the numbers and pay dividends out of Continental’s assets. In a good year, he could understate earnings and save for a rainy day by hiding the extra income at Continental.

By this time, Ivar and Berning had developed a much cozier relationship. Ivar had given up on getting Berning’s first name right, but at least he addressed letters with an honorific now, as in “My dear Mr Berning.”27 Berning had gotten over the scrubbed trip to Japan, and instead was focused on an upcoming trip to Europe with his wife, at Ivar’s expense. He wrote that “Mrs Berning and I are looking forward with a great deal of anticipation to our visit to Sweden.”28 A.D. Berning’s responses to detailed inquiries from Durant ranged from murky to non-responsive. What, Durant wanted to know, did International Match’s income statement entry of $4,318,827.84 for “income from other sources” represent? Berning cryptically answered that the “other sources” entry “represents all the income of the corporation other than from sales. It includes dividends and interest received on investments, interest received on advances, accounts receivable, etc., profit on exchange and other miscellaneous items.”29 Whatever that meant, it could not have inspired much confidence.

Music had always been one of Hell's most prudent investments, and Tremon took a workmanlike joy in deliving a steady dividend of crushed dreams, bitterness and, above all, souls

While it can be frustrating to teach young children because they don’t know how to behave, the upside is that they are virtually a blank slate, and if you take advantage of that fact to teach them to become good learners, that investment will pay dividends for years to come.

Beijing’s logic for subnational influence is straightforward. First, friendly relations at this level can help smooth the way for investment in strategic assets—ports, regional airports (including pilot training schools), satellite dishes (as in New Zealand), developments adjacent to military bases, certain agricultural developments and the like. Second, Beijing knows that some subnational leaders will graduate to national parliaments, where the friendship can pay even higher dividends. Finally, they understand that local leaders can exert political pressure on the centre.

In one day, God can deliver from an addiction that has held a person captive for years. In one day, God can bring back a prodigal child who has run away and been gone for decades. In one day, God can provide more than someone has accumulated in a lifetime. But if we are going to experience a miracle one day, we need to pray every day. Too many people pray like they are playing the lottery. Prayer is more like an investment account. Every deposit accumulates compound interest. And one day, if we keep making deposits every day, it will pay dividends beyond our wildest imagination.

This is why total return matters—not just income. The total return to investors over three years was –13.7 percent even though each year the company started out showing a yield in excess of 15 percent. Also, the amount of dividend payments dropped over 30 percent. There are investors who will see 15 percent yields and think it's a can't-miss investment opportunity with little-to-no-risk involved because there's a dividend payment attached. Yield makes investors feel safe because it's tangible. As usual, higher returns come from higher risks, and a higher yield means higher risk. Either you own high-quality investments with a lower yield, but more safety in the short term, or you own riskier investments with a higher yield and less short-term safety of principal.

The long-term increase in the stock market is entirely the result of the increase in long-term dividends and earnings growth of the companies that make up the market. How much investors are willing to pay for those earnings and dividends will change constantly. Much of these fluctuations have to do with speculation, but most of them have to do with the fact that investors are constantly projecting out the recent past into an uncertain future. That doesn't mean the odds are stacked against individual investors; just the ones who are unable to control their emotions.

Although at one time a measure of a business’s prosperity, it has become a relic: stocks should simply not be bought on the basis of their dividend yield. Too often struggling companies sport high dividend yields, not because the dividends have been increased, but because the share prices have fallen. Fearing that the stock price will drop further if the dividend is cut, managements maintain the payout, weakening the company even more.

Be passionate about the business but dispassionate about the stock. Celebrate the big successes of your businesses and reflect on failures. A true feeling of ownership gives an investor the conviction to hold. When you think like a business owner, you no longer view stocks as pieces of paper or buy them with “target prices” in mind. Instead, you view stocks as part ownership in a business and you want to savor the journey alongside the promoters. As companies grow larger and more profitable, their stockholders share in the increased profits and dividends. Invest for the long term. Live fully today. Every day, millions of hardworking people around the world are doing great things at so many companies. As investors, we are thankful.

The first, or predictive, approach could also be called the qualitative approach, since it emphasizes prospects, management, and other nonmeasurable, albeit highly important, factors that go under the heading of quality. The second, or protective, approach may be called the quantitative or statistical approach, since it emphasizes the measurable relationships between selling price and earnings, assets, dividends, and so forth. Incidentally, the quantitative method is really an extension—into the field of common stocks—of the viewpoint that security analysis has found to be sound in the selection of bonds and preferred stocks for investment. In our own attitude and professional work we were always committed to the quantitative approach. From the first we wanted to make sure that we were getting ample value for our money in concrete, demonstrable terms. We were not willing to accept the prospects and promises of the future as compensation

Stock Guide material includes “Earnings and Dividend Rankings,” which are based on stability and growth of these factors for the past eight years. (Thus price attractiveness does not enter here.) We include the S & P rankings in our Table 15-1. Ten of the 15 issues are ranked B+ (= average) and one (American Maize) is given the “high” rating of A. If our enterprising investor wanted to add a seventh mechanical criterion to his choice, by considering only issues ranked by Standard & Poor’s as average or better in quality, he might still have about 100 such issues to choose from. One might say that a group of issues, of at least average quality, meeting criteria of financial condition as well, purchasable at a low multiplier of current earnings and below asset value, should offer good promise of satisfactory investment results.

Time to me is a renewable resource that pays infinite dividends when invested in purposed priorities.

We get to model Jesus’love in action to our kids. We get to set an example of a servant’s heart. We get to be the hands and feet of Jesus to these little ones. We get to point our kids to Jesus and pour into them in their most formative years. And we get to acknowledge our struggles, admit when we are wrong, and experience their forgiveness. Ultimately, we have the opportunity to show our kids what humble leadership looks like, and that’s powerful stuff! And sometimes we get opportunities to see all that work pay off in big dividends as our kids model Jesus’love right back to us! If you’re feeling the work you are doing is mundane and thankless, picture me leaning in and looking into your eyes right now and saying this: Don’t give up. Press on. Keep loving the people around you wholeheartedly. Keep investing. Keep showing up and leading with humility. It is making a difference—even if you can’t see it right now.

When railway companies faltered in the late 1840s, struggling to return 10 per cent on investments, many began to fiddle their books. For example, they treated costs as capital investments rather than as expenses, thereby inflating their profits; and used fresh investments instead of profits to pay out dividends (a strategy now known as a Ponzi scheme, made infamous most recently by Bernie Madoff in 2009).

if we are going to experience a miracle one day, we need to pray every day. Too many people pray like they are playing the lottery. Prayer is more like an investment account. Every deposit accumulates compound interest. And one day, if we keep making deposits every day, it will pay dividends beyond our wildest imagination.

When you buy a share of stock, you become a partial owner of the business. And as a partial owner, you are entitled to a share of the profits that the business generates. Most mature companies will do 2 things with their profits: They will reinvest some of their profits back into the business in order to grow it. They will return some of their profits to the owners. Profits that are returned to the owners are called dividends. If you own a dividend-paying stock, you will usually get paid a dividend every 3 months.

Here’s how to calculate the dividend yield of a stock: Take the annual dividend payment ($1.56 in this case) and divide it by the current price of the stock ($41.55). In this case, that gives you 0.03754513, or 3.75%. 3.75% is Coke’s current dividend yield.

old things age in reverse. The longer they’ve been around, the longer they will likely be around. This is what’s called “the Lindy Effect.

You can just buy the ProShares S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats ETF. The ticker is NOBL, and this ETF (exchange-traded fund) trades just like a stock. You can purchase it using any brokerage account. Today NOBL trades at $62.65 per share. So if you have $1,000, you can buy 15.96 shares of NOBL (1000 divided by 62.65). You’ll pay an expense ratio of 0.35% to own this ETF. What this means is that if you invest $1,000 in this ETF, you will pay them $3.50 every year for the privilege of owning their ETF.

Invest in companies that pay a dividend

Blue-chip stocks are a reasonable investment for the elderly investor because they usually pay cash dividends which the retired person may need to live on, and are usually more conservative than other investments, excluding bonds. Holdings in these stocks should be long-term to avoid trading costs and speculation.

but the truth is that comparing what private equity firms used to be—and where the perception of private equity still sits in many quarters—to what they are now is like comparing a Motorola cellphone from the 1990s to the latest iPhone. There’s a world of differences; it’s not even close. For pension funds and other investors in private equity funds, the firms they back gives them access to investment opportunities they can’t find or execute themselves. What’s more, they get consistent investment returns out of these opportunities, whether they include leveraged buyouts, credit investments, infrastructure assets, essential utilities, real estate transactions, technology deals, natural resources projects, banks, insurance companies, or life science opportunities. They can buy companies, carve out businesses, build up companies through acquisitions and organic growth, spin off businesses, take companies private from the public market, buy businesses from other funds they manage, draw margin loans to finance dividends, and refinance the capital structure pre-exit. And more besides.

The techniques the men used to justify keeping the debts off the balance sheet varied, but they typically involved the use of companies that were loosely related to Kreuger & Toll and Swedish Match. Their argument was that the debts really belonged to those related companies, not to Ivar’s companies, and therefore they did not need to be listed on the balance sheet. Swedish Match became one of the first companies to borrow millions of dollars through a complex web of interlocking and related corporations and partnerships without recording those borrowings as liabilities on its balance sheet. During the second half of 1919, Ivar and Rydbeck had suggested to a group of bankers the idea of “a syndicate apart from the Swedish Match Company.”6 The key word was “apart.” Swedish Match would obtain funding through private side deals with several banks. Ivar would use the money for a range of purposes: pay dividends and interest, expand match exports, buy new factories and raw materials, and invest in new industries. Then, Swedish Match would record any gains from these activities in its financial statements. However, it would not record any corresponding liabilities.

At least that was Ivar’s reputation. The truth was more complicated. A large portion of the dividends recently paid by Swedish Match and Kreuger & Toll came from cash raised by International Match in America. In other words, the dividends paid to old investors came from proceeds raised from new ones. That pyramid approach, which had elements of Ponzi’s scheme, couldn’t last forever, and Ivar knew it. Nevertheless, Ivar really was making money, a lot of it, from match operations throughout the world. Unlike Charles Ponzi’s postal reply coupon scam, Ivar’s profits were real. Swedish Match made and sold billions of boxes of matches every year. Kreuger & Toll built landmark buildings throughout Europe. Ivar had real investments in real businesses, ranging from matches to real estate to film. No one could fake that.

To fill this gap in the capital market, Davis and Rock set themselves up as a limited partnership, the same legal structure that had been used by a short-lived rival called Draper, Gaither & Anderson.[18] Rather than identifying startups and then seeking out corporate investors, they began by raising a fund that would render corporate investors unnecessary. As the two active, or “general,” partners, Davis and Rock each seeded the fund with $100,000 of their own capital. Then, ignoring the easy loans to be had from the fashionable SBIC structure, they raised just under $3.2 million from some thirty “limited” partners—rich individuals who served as passive investors.[19] The beauty of this size and structure was that the Davis & Rock partnership now had a war chest seven and a half times larger than an SBIC, and with it the ammunition to supply companies with enough capital to grow aggressively. At the same time, by keeping the number of passive investors under the legal threshold of one hundred, the partnership flew under the regulatory radar, avoiding the restrictions that ensnared the SBICs and Doriot’s ARD.[20] Sidestepping yet another weakness to be found in their competitors, Davis and Rock promised at the outset to liquidate their fund after seven years. The general partners had their own money in the fund, and thus a healthy incentive to invest with caution. At the same time, they could deploy the outside partners’ capital for a limited time only. Their caution would be balanced with deliberate aggression. Indeed, everything about the fund’s design was calculated to support an intelligent but forceful growth mentality. Unlike the SBICs, Davis & Rock raised money purely in the form of equity, not debt. The equity providers—that is, the outside limited partners—knew not to expect dividends, so Davis and Rock were free to invest in ambitious startups that used every dollar of capital to expand their business.[21] As general partners, Davis and Rock were personally incentivized to prioritize expansion: they took their compensation in the form of a 20 percent share of the fund’s capital appreciation. Meanwhile, Rock was at pains to extend this equity mentality to the employees of his portfolio companies. Having witnessed the effect of employee share ownership on the early culture of Fairchild, he believed in awarding managers, scientists, and salesmen with stock and stock options. In sum, everybody in the Davis & Rock orbit—the limited partners, the general partners, the entrepreneurs, their key employees—was compensated in the form of equity.

Seek established companies with a record of profitability and dividend payments - avoid start-ups and biotech or exploration stocks.

I have always believed that most investors and analysts over-complicate matters. I try to focus on just two yardsticks when investing in a trading company, e.g. PZ Customs: dividend yields and PERs, and two for an investment or property company, e.g. Daejan - net asset values (NAVs) and gearing, i.e. the level of borrowings a company has relative to assets. The gearing factor importantly also applies to trading companies.

Personally, I like to buy shares on a modest valuation - ideally, say, a dividend yield of 5-6% - and on a single-figure PER. Apart from the obvious attractions of receiving the dividend, the payment of a dividend acts as a significant discipline on the Board of a PLC in that it has to find the cash, each year, to pay those dividends.

What we want is a company that increases profits (and hopefully dividends) each year and where the rating (PE ratio) that the stock market/investors place on the company's shares increases significantly. This is the 'double whammy' any investor should be seeking.

Proprietorial PLCs - companies that are controlled or dominated by one family - have always fascinated me. I hold shares. I like the alignment of board and shareholder interests, the focus on conservative growth and "stewarding" a business through generations, their generally low borrowings and usually progressive dividend policy.

Thus we have two different types of 'value' purchases - Nichols/Fenner/Beattie on attractive dividend yields and modest PERs, and Daejan at a significant discount to assets.

If you have profitable holdings, my general approach is to let profits run. Don't sell if you are invested in a company delivering profits and dividend growth year on year. Most of my mistakes have been in selling too soon, although uncomfortably there have been bad selections as well. In the investing world there is wildly different advice: some advisers say sell half a successful holding so the balance stands you in nil cost. Then there is an old Rothschild saying: 'I made my money by selling too soon', i.e. not being too greedy. But generally I would let profits run.

Currently, I am very focused on dividends - accepting that few shares are likely to show capital growth in the short term. From my higher-yielding stocks, I am hoping for maintenance of dividends - a dividend increase is a bonus; a "passing" or slashing of the payment is bad news. These board decisions reflect not only the profitability/debt levels of the company, but also its attitude to shareholder dividends, so past dividend history is an important consideration - as is the size of directors' holdings.

Writing in November's annual report, the company's financial director said: "The group is well placed, not withstanding the current disruption of financial markets, to fund and support its operations, with continuing access to medium and long-term debt finance, cash resources and, where necessary, shorter-term facilities." The chairman concluded: "Despite the inevitable challenges, we believe we are very strongly placed to outperform. For the longer term, our business drivers remain highly positive." Hardly the language of a likely dividend cut!