Updated June 5th, 2018
The Dividend Kings are the best-of-the-best in dividend longevity.
What is a Dividend King? Stocks with 50 or more consecutive years of dividend increases.
The downloadable Dividend Kings Spreadsheet List below contains the following for each stock in the index:
- Dividend yield
- Price-to-earnings ratio
- Consecutive years of dividend increase
Along with other important investing metrics.
Click here to download my Dividend Kings Excel Spreadsheet now. Keep reading this article to learn more.
How To Use The Dividend Kings List to Find Dividend Stock Ideas
The Dividend Kings list is a great place to find dividend stock ideas.
However, not all the stocks in the Dividend Kings list make a great investment at any given time.
Some stocks might be overvalued. Conversely, some might be undervalued – making great long-term holdings for dividend growth investors.
For those unfamiliar with Microsoft Excel, the following walkthrough shows how to filter the Dividend Kings list for the stocks with the most attractive valuation based on the price-to-earnings ratio.
Step 1: Download the Dividend Kings Excel Spreadsheet above.
Step 2: Click on the filter icon in the price-to-earnings ratio column, as indicated below.
Step 3: Fill in the fields according to what stock valuations are appealing to you. In the example below, I have filtered for Dividend Kings with a price-to-earnings ratio less than 22 and listed them in ascending order.
Looking for businesses that have a long history of dividend increases isn’t a perfect way to identify stocks that will increase their dividends every year in the future, but there is considerable consistency in the Dividend Kings (and Dividend Aristocrats).
This article will take a look at each of the current Dividend Kings to determine which ones are suitable investments likely to have decades more dividend growth – and which ones aren’t as timely.
There are currently 25 Dividend Kings. Each Dividend King satisfies the primary requirement to be a Dividend Aristocrat (25 years of consecutive dividend increases) twice over.
Table of Contents
You can skip to specific sections of this article on the Dividend Kings using the links below.
Performance of the Dividend Kings
Unlike the Dividend Aristocrats (which is a formal stock market index maintained by Standard & Poor’s), the Dividend Kings are not officially regulated and monitored by a governing body.
This means that tracking the historical performance of the Dividend Kings can be difficult. More specifically, performance tracking of the Dividend Kings often introduces significant survivorship bias.
Investigating their performance can still be useful. In the diagram below, the long-term performance of an equal-weight portfolio of today’s Dividend Kings is plotted against the performance of the S&P 500.
Source: Sure Dividend
Note: This performance chart excludes FMCB as the company’s illiquidity makes it difficult to acquire accurate historical price information. It also excludes any previous Dividend Kings that ended their streak of dividend increases, creating notable lookback/survivorship bias.
That chart nicely illustrates the meaningful outperformance of the Dividend Kings over time. This outperformance becomes even more powerful when combined with actual dollar figures.
In the diagram below, you can see the result of investing $100,000 into an equal-weighted portfolio of the Dividend Kings 20 years ago at the beginning of 1998.
Source: Sure Dividend
Note: This performance chart excludes FMCB as the company’s illiquidity makes it difficult to acquire accurate historical price information. It also excludes any previous Dividend Kings that ended their streak of dividend increases, creating notable lookback/survivorship bias.
During the 20-year period from January 1, 1998, to April 6th, 2018, an equal weight portfolio of today’s dividend kings would have turned $100,000 into $660,786. For comparison, the same $100,000 investment in an S&P 500 index fund would have grown to just $383,417.
While past performance is never a guarantee of future results, this does provide compelling evidence for considering investing in the Dividend Kings today.
In the next section of this article, we will provide an overview of the sector and market capitalization characteristics of the Dividend Kings.
Sector & Market Capitalization Overview
The sector and market capitalization characteristics of the Dividend Kings are very different from the characteristics of the broader stock market. The following image shows the number of Dividend Kings in each sector of the stock market.
Source: Sure Dividend
The Dividend Kings are very overweight in the Industrials, Consumer Defensive, and Utilities sectors. Interestingly, the Dividend Kings has no exposure to the Technology sector, which is the largest component of the S&P 500 index.
The Dividend Kings also have some interesting characteristics with respect to market capitalization. These trends are illustrated below.
Source: Sure Dividend
Interestingly, the majority of the Dividend Kings have market capitalizations below $20 billion.
In the next section of this article, you can read detailed analysis of each individual Dividend Kings.
Dividend Kings Analysis
Basic Materials
Consumer Cyclical
Consumer Defensive
- The Colgate-Palmolive Company (CL)
- Hormel Foods Corporation (HRL)
- The Coca-Cola Company (KO)
- Lancaster Colony (LANC)
- Procter & Gamble (PG)
- Tootsie Roll Industries (TR)
Financial Services
Healthcare
Industrial
- ABM Industries (ABM)
- Dover Corporation (DOV)
- Emerson Electric (EMR)
- 3M Company (MMM)
- Nordson (NDSN)
- Parker Hannifin (PH)
- Stanley Black & Decker (SWK)
Real Estate
Utilities
- American States Water (AWR)
- California Water Service (CWT)
- Northwest Natural Gas (NWN)
- SJW Group (SJW)
- Vectren (VVC)
Final Thoughts
Screening to find the best Dividend Kings is not the only way to find investment ideas.
Sure Dividend maintains similar databases on the following useful universes of stocks:
- The Dividend Aristocrats: S&P 500 stocks with 25+ years of consecutive dividend increases.
- The Dividend Achievers: dividend stocks with 10+ years of consecutive dividend increases.
- The Complete List of High Dividend Stocks: all stocks with 5%+ dividend yields.
- The Complete List of Monthly Dividend Stocks: our database currently contains more than 40 stocks that pay dividends every month.
- The Sure Dividend Blue Chip Stocks List: our list of “blue chip stocks” contains dozens of public companies with 100+ year operating histories and 3%+ dividend yields.
You may also be looking to bolster your exposure to a particular sector of the stock market. You can download databases of stocks from each sector of the stock market below:
- The Complete List of Dividend-Paying Technology Stocks
- The Complete List of Dividend-Paying Telecommunications Stocks
- The Complete List of Dividend-Paying Industrial Stocks
- The Complete List of Dividend-Paying Utility Stocks
- The Complete List of Dividend-Paying Consumer Cyclical Stocks
- The Complete List of Dividend-Paying Consumer Staples Stocks
- The Complete List of Dividend-Paying Materials Stocks
- The Complete List of Dividend-Paying Energy Stocks
- The Complete List of Dividend-Paying Financial Stocks
- The Complete List of Dividend-Paying Healthcare Stocks
There is nothing magical about investing in the Dividend Kings. They are simply a group of high-quality businesses with shareholder-friendly management teams that have strong competitive advantages.
Purchasing businesses with these characteristics at fair or better prices and holding them for long periods of time will likely result in strong long-term investment performance.
The most appealing part of investing is that you have unlimited choice. You can buy into mediocre businesses, or just the excellent companies.
Often, great businesses command premium prices. This does not mean they are automatically unnattractive investments. As Warren Buffett says:
“When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever.”