Dividend Growth Ideas

Mike Nadel is a Seeking Alpha contributor who wrote an article about some stocks called the “Nifty Fifty of the 1970s.” He thought it would be good to get input for ideas for stocks for the present. He asked 10 fellow Seeking Alpha contributors to choose 50 companies each for a new list that he hoped would be “even niftier.” The ten contributors suggested a total of 163 stocks. Mike took the top fifty vote-getters and bought $500 of each of the 50, for a total investment of $25,000 in December 2014.

It is true that the last five years have been good ones for the stock market, so it isn’t surprising that he now has $42,188, or a 68.6% gain so far. But 68.6% is far better than most mutual funds. He didn’t invest in the S&P 500, but the stocks he bought were large cap stocks. His worst choice was General Electric as it lost 47% . His best was Microsoft. It is interesting that Mike’s $500 bought more shares of GE – 20 of them. He was only able to buy 5 shares of Apple for his $500. Never think that buying more shares is a better deal. It might be, but investors shouldn’t look at the per share price when buying an investment. It is far better to buy one share of a great company than 100 shares of an average company.

The main blog image shows his top 17 stocks. I have ten of them in my IRA and some of them in Cindie’s and Cindie’s mom’s account. In the next two images you can see the balance of Mr. Nadel’s choices. In each case I show stocks that I own as well. Note that many thought Target’s and AT&T’s glory days were over. Target has certainly risen far above the crowd’s wisdom. This year has also been a good one for AT&T.