Canadian investors haven’t had to think too hard about their dividend stocks over the past decade or so.
“This is no longer the old dividend universe where you could cobble together a dozen dividend-paying names, buy them and forget it,” Craig Basinger, chief market strategist at Purpose Investments, wrote in a report. This is an income investor’s kind of stock market. Over the past 18 months, however, dividend strategies have been tested.
The Dow Jones Canada Select Dividend Index, meanwhile, is down by about 9 per cent over that time. In the current selloff, the average Canadian dividend fund has been an additional burden rather than a relief from the volatility. There are most likely a couple of key forces at work. The years between the global financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic were characterized by persistently low interest rates, which made it difficult to put together a portfolio with a decent level of income.
Many companies borrowed heavily to cater to a seemingly endless appetite for dividends, in some instances at the expense of their fundamentals. “Now all those other things matter just as much as checking the high dividend box,” Mr. Barasch said, citing debt levels and return on capital as key examples.
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