The Ultimate Dividend Playbook: Income, Insight and Independence for Today's Investor

This book uncovers one of the most powerful investing techniques that no one seems to know - that investment in high dividend growth companies can be extremely profitable. The author explains why and gives some innovative insights into how to implement such a strategy. The book is worthwhile alone for the two tables that show examples of companies that meet the author's criteria. Based on this book I plan to expand my investments of this type.

Sometime ago I bought and read following books on dividend investing: 1. Beating the S & P with Dividends, How to Build a Superior Portfolio of Dividend Yielding Stocks by Peter O'Shea and Jonathan Worrall 2. The Standard & Poor's Guide to Building Wealth with Dividend Stocks by Joseph R. Tigue 3. Dividend Growth Investment Strategy, How to keep your Retirement Income Doubling Every Five Years by RoxAnn Klugman, J.D. The above books are rather shallow in their treatment. Recently, I bought "The Ultimate Dividend Playbook" by Josh Peters. I have read a few chapters already and find it excellent: It deals with the why, how and what of dividend investing. It gives you the knowledge to be confident in dividend investing. I have already read the book "The Five Rules for Successful Stock Investing: Morningstar's Guide to Building Wealth and Winning in the Market" by Pat Dorsey, which is an excellent book on fundamentals of stock investing, and I recommend reading it first before reading the Dividend Playbook.

The Ultimate Dividend Playbook.Peters- Morningstar This is the most reveling read on dividends. What to do, how to do, and most important, when to do. First and foremost lay out a plan for your future investment strategy. If your stock is growing and the dividend is increasing rapidly, and the stock has a good continual good read in profit and growth, I normally re-invest my dividend for a year. If the stock begins to vasilate on a regular basis, I stop the re-investment and take the cash.Then if I know that the stock climb back up, I will use the cash dividend to buy more. If you notice when the dividend is re-invested, it normally is at a stocks high. This is a wonderful book for anyone that wants to take control of there investments. Thank you,Peters Morningstar Anthony Oliverio

Like Clif, I am an early retiree who relies on dividends for an (in my case, modest) income stream. I disclose this so the reader can place this review in perspective. The thesis of this book coincided with my own investing philosophy, so I anticipated both friendly and familiar ground, but the author argued persuasively the advantages of dividend-paying stock strategy over alternatives, and he provided sufficient detail on the analysis of the dividend aspect of equities to improve my knowledge in this area. The book's thrust is that you may be better off receiving income via dividends than regularly selling off stocks from your portfolio or relying on fixed income instruments. Moreover, even if you are a long-term investor looking for a modicum of growth and not only immediate income, the author confirms the value-investing maxim that div-payers tend to perform better than non-div stocks over the long term. And to me perhaps the most convincing construction, also proposed by the book Active Value Investing, is that if you are going to own a stock and that stock's performance is flat or down for relatively long periods of time (say, during range-bound or bear markets), would you not want the stock to pay you for holding it in the meantime? The author uses a variety of methods to analyze how to select dividend-payers that are likely to continue paying, and increasing, their dividends. He focuses on ROE vice cash flow, and explains why. He also reveals his own portfolio. One nit-pick is the promotion of his newsletter, which is common among investing authors but nonetheless detracts a bit from the point being made. It is worth noting that this book was put to bed mid-2007, so his fairly unalloyed praise of REITs should be viewed in that context. He does somewhat presciently warn on the risks of bank dividends. Naturally, the principles of dividend investing apply, generally, regardless of the prevailing market condition, and the author also correctly cautions against the tendency to chase the highest dividend yields at any particular time rather than looking at a stock's dividend yield/growth history and other relevant factors. Many financial advisors and institutions recommend either singly or in combination the fixed income (bonds, annuities) or "sell x% of your stock portfolio each year" method of generating investment income streams. The author offers the dividend-stream approach as an equally viable consideration for the long-term investor. And finally, what the reader should expect from this book is less a list of what stocks to buy than "here's how to pick solid dividend-paying stocks, and here are the ones I selected."

Let me be upfront, I am a fan of dividend investing in general and Josh's Morningstar Dividend Investor Newsletter in particular. As an early retiree I have been struggling with a way to have enough income to enjoy life, while protecting my nest egg from the ravages of inflation. I think this is a valuable book for the intermediate or advance investor to own for two reasons. First, while dividend investing has become somewhat trendy in the last couple of years, there hasn't been much in depth analysis of why dividends matter. Secondly, the truly outstanding portion of the Dividend Playbook is it teaches the average investor how to search out and evaluate dividend stocks, and figure out which are likely to be good investments. Overall, the Playbook is the rare business book that does a better job teaching you how to catch fish, than making the case why you should eat fish! Target Audience. I think anybody who is a current or potential M* Dividend Investor Newsletter subscriber would be crazy not to buy this book, it is a fraction of the cost of the newsletter, and makes the newsletter much more valuable. I'd also commend it to any do it yourself stock picker. I think it would be valuable people looking at purchasing dividend ETF like DVY or mutual funds. A beginning investor who isn't really comfortable with terms like Return on Equity, or an index fund investor, or 401K investor doesn't really need it. Why dividends? Josh quickly nailed my biggest problem as a retiree depending on an equity heavy (80%) investor. It is awfully hard to figure out when to buy a stock and even harder to know when to sell. I think even for a pure index fund investor with a 50% stock/bond mix who is rebalancing his portfolio in Jan 2008, must be uneasy with recent market volatility. I am sure many ask themselves, do I really want to buy more stocks? They have gone down a lot in the last couple of months. For the individual stock investor figuring out which stocks are overpriced and what is underpriced is way to much work. According to Josh, the beauty of the dividend income approach is by relying on income you are letting the stock do the work for you. As long as the companies keep paying dividends and they continue to grow there is no need to worry about how manic depressive Mr. Market feels about your stocks today or tomorrow. The first few of chapters make the case for dividend investing being superior. I was most interested in Professor Jeremy Siegel (of Stocks for the Long Run fame) study of the top 100 highest yielding stocks in the S & P 500 earning an average of 14.3% annually while the lowest 100 yielding making only 9.5% annually between 1958 and 2003. Several other shorter term (10-25 years) studies were also cited showing the superiority of dividend investing. One of my main criticism of the book, is I don't think nearly enough time was devoted (only few pages out of 335) to bolstering Josh's claim "There's no good reason an investor needs to own any n