Customer Reviews

All About Dividend Investing: The Easy Way to Get Started (All About Series)

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This recent entry in the "All About..." investment series covers a lot of territory, but many of its most useful points are made in the first few pages. Dividend paying stocks should be in your portfolio because their cash flow provides steady income with less price volatility in up and down markets. Dividends offer the possibility of positive returns during extended periods when there is little or no price appreciation in the equity markets. In fact, the authors believe that we are in for a "fairly long stretch" of disappointing returns based on their reading of bull and bear market cycle history. Retiring baby boomers looking to squeeze more income from their financial assets will want dividend producing stocks - another reason to own them ahead of their demographic buying wave. Recent tax law changes that include a low maximum 15% rate for most common stock dividends have also made these investments more attractive.

Much of what follows will be of interest to the Do It Yourself portfolio builder. The authors provide advice on analyzing a company's financial ratios to determine the sustainability of a company's dividend and their ability to raise it in the future. Investors are advised how to diversify their portfolio and suitable criteria for screening their holdings. Managing the portfolio with an automatic stop-loss sell discipline to preserve capital in declining markets is a much discussed and infrequently used strategy. Here it gets close attention. My sense of this book is that readers will pick and choose ideas and pieces of their strategy rather than try to follow their methodology step by step. Chapter 11 on DRIPS, Folios, and Mutual Funds and the final Chapter 12 can be skipped.

If you're fairly new to investing and have gone beyond mutual funds and dipped your toes into a pool of stocks, you're probably like most new investors... you picked a few growth stocks because those are the stocks that are exciting and sexy. I always wondered what a "Value" stock was and why anyone except our elder citizens would want dividend stocks in boring industries like utilities.

This book will help open that world to you and give you some basic tools to start with in picking valuable, dividend producing stocks. It has actually made it exciting for me to search, pick, and buy those boring stocks!

I'm still young and new to investing, and I found this book, and a few other "All About" books, to be my favorite. They're technical enough without being too technical. And broad enough to give you a general view from which you can then dig deeper.

Don Schreiber makes a strong and persuasive argument for why any savvy investor needs to give attention to dividend investing. This book showed me exactly how I can be a savvier investor. Now I have a better grasp of the tax consequences and impact of inflation on my investments and how stocks with excellent dividends can shield me. This is an excellent primer for investors at every level.

I have been a big fan of dividend investing for years. Generally its not exciting but its dependable. Its often the only money you get to see in a share for a long time.

A plus is as the writer states is the market goes down the shares rarely drop that much as it reaches a point where people will buy it just for the dividend rate.

Having made this one observation, a few times in his book, you will find that if you know something about shares then there is little new or orginal here.

By the way the negative about dividend investing is what this writer does not tell you is if the company has a bad year and cuts its dividend, then the price can drop dramatically. So you still can get burnt badly.

Great reading for the average investor who directs his/her's own investments and wants a solid foundation about dividends and how they work for you over time.

This is a very good book, full of pratical advices. It is easy to read and understand. It's useful for planning a rational investment strategy. Recommended!