The stock market hasn’t returned a single red cent in over twelve years, as measured by the S&P 500. Twelve years is a long time to go without earning a return on your investment, particularly if you are close to retirement.
With the boom years of the 1980s and 1990s now a distant memory, it is not shocking to see investors losing faith in the cult of capital gains and gravitating instead to dividend-paying stocks and ETFs. In a world in which paper gains can be ephemeral, it’s good to be paid in cold, hard cash.
In many ways, this is simply a return to the basics of investing. Historically, before federal capital gains taxes and Modern Portfolio Theory shifted the industry to a focus on growth, dividends were the primary source of investor returns (see Figure 1), and over the past twelve years dividends have been the only source of investor returns.
