About Dividend Yields

One of my investment strategies is to buy dividend-paying stocks. When making investment decisions on dividend-paying stocks, it is important to know what the dividend yield of the stock is. Basically, a dividend yield is the sum of the regular dividends that a company pays over the course of a year, divided by the current stock price. In the United States, most dividend-paying stocks pay out every three months (quarterly). In a previous post, I stated that Pfizer (NYSE: PFE) had a dividend yield of 3.43%. Currently, Pfizer pays 24 cents per share in quarterly dividends, for a total of 96 cents in dividends per year. At the time of my post, Pfizer was trading at 27.96. If you take the annual dividend divided by the price, you get 0.96/27.96 = 0.0343 or 3.43%.

[Note that PFE has risen in price to 28.41 and the yield is now 0.96/28.41 = 3.38%. It is important to know that when the stock price goes up, the yield goes down. On the other hand, if the stock price went down, the yield would go up.]

When researching a stock at a financial website such as Yahoo Finance, the dividend and yield is listed with the company quote. I estimate that 95% of the time this number is correct. However, sometimes this number is inaccurate or outdated. This can be the case if a dividend has been reduced or eliminated. For example in another post I mentioned that NetBank has sustained a series of quarterly losses, and its management has decided to suspend their dividend. So the yield for NetBank (Nasdaq: NTBK) is actually 0%, but the Yahoo stock information still indicates that it pays a dividend.

Another case is when a one-time special dividend is paid by a company. This will make you believe that the dividend (and thus the yield) is greater than it really is. Unfortunately, it is not always obvious whether a dividend payment is a regular dividend or a special dividend. So be careful when looking only at the dividend yield statistic on financial sites.

While dividend yield is an important criteria used for selecting stocks worth buying, it is not the only criteria. Dividend yield is not the most important criteria either. In future posts, I will cover some of the other criteria that I use for selecting stocks to buy.

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