Hey all, sorry its been a while since I’ve posted. If you’ve followed me on Seeking Alpha you’ve noticed my activity there has picked up a bit of late with several new articles over the last 3 weeks.

First off, I published my updated Top 10 Healthcare Stocks For Dividend Growth And Income, which has my picks for the best stocks in the sector for income and total return potential.

For a preview, here were the ten selections:

The article provides an updated spreadsheet of my top 23 dividend growth healthcare companies, and includes dividend growth projections, current valuations, and total return projections for each company.

I also provided some commentary on the top ten selections, along with FAST Graphs for each pick.

In addition to that article, I have also updated the Healthcare Watch List page here on DGI For The DIY, and have added links to a copy of the live spreadsheet on Google Docs and a PDF upload link for that watch list.

My goal is to eventually provide similar updated info on every sector that I’ve covered and include the live Google Doc spreadsheets for readers to use.

QUICK NOTE: If you are finding these watch lists useful and enjoying their availability, please let me know. As you may suspect, this takes a lot of time to set up and keep updated. If these are helpful for people I will continue doing it, or if you have any other ideas on info you’d like added, please speak up as well.

Another effort I’ve made this year is to offer dividend growth predictions for companies held in my portfolio.

On January 25th, I published an article about 11 Companies With Impending Dividend Increases, which covered Church & Dwight, Chatham Lodging Trust, Digital Realty Trust, Dr Pepper Snapple Group, Gilead Sciences, GameStop Corp., Coca-Cola, Polaris Industries, QUALCOMM, Ross Stores, and Xcel Energy.

The last of those companies declared a new dividend rate on March 17th, so on March 20th I published a Dividend Growth Prediction Scorecard to see how the prognostications fared.

Spoiler alert! I guessed too high on Gilead and too low on Ross Stores, but overall I’m pretty happy with the final results.

As a follow-up to those articles, I gave my 5 Dividend Growth Predictions For April on expected dividend increase announcements from Apple Inc. $AAPL, Ameriprise Financial $AMP, International Business Machines $IBM, Wells Fargo & Company $WFC, and Exxon Mobil Corp. $XOM.

I am expecting an average 6.5% in dividend growth from the companies; check out the link if you want to see my thoughts on where the bigger raises will come from.

Those declarations should all occur around April 25 & 26. Should be an exciting week for my portfolio!

My last work of late was Yes, You Can Still Build A 4% Yielding Portfolio In Today’s Market, Part II, an update to the original article that was published a year ago.

A common complaint I hear is that with the market continually hitting new highs, there aren’t many investment options for income investors. The goal of these two articles was to take a scan through my various watch lists and identify a handful of companies that could be used to build a portfolio with a 4% minimum yield.

The result for the latest article was a diversified mix of 18 companies from 9 sectors that offer an overall yield of 4% and a good chance at continued dividend growth going forward.

The selections were all rated BBB+ or better by S&P, have an average dividend growth streak of 19 years, a 5YR annual dividend growth rate of 11.7%, and a 10YR annual dividend growth rate of 8.7%. I also provided a quick guess of future dividend growth, which came out to an average of 6.3% for the portfolio.

What’s In The Pipeline?

I have several irons in the fire, and plenty of ideas for future content.

First, I am currently writing a growth stock focus article for a contributor contest being put on by Seeking Alpha.

Here is the contest’s description:

With the stock market near all-time highs, we are announcing our next stock pitch contest. We are looking for ideas on stocks trading at recent extreme levels. The subject stock must have hit a 52-week high or low since February 1st, 2017, and must still be near its 52-week high or low (within 10%). It could be a stock at a 52-week high, which the author thinks will go higher or a stock at a 52-week high, which the author thinks will fail to meet expectations. It could, conversely, be a stock at a 52-week low, which the author thinks will go continue lower or a stock at a 52-week low, which the author thinks will rebound. This is a contest for bargain hunters and bottom feeders, broken axles and terminal cases, high-quality firms and multi-inning stories, and overhyped stocks and momentum changes.

I am about 75% done with the article, and hope to finish it up in the next day or two. Hopefully it will be accepted into the contest and get some consideration for a little prize money.

If nothing else, it’s forced me to look closer at a growth stock (out of the dividend paying realm) that I’ve had on my watch list for a while, and given me an excuse to do some due diligence on it for future consideration.

In addition to that article, I am two weeks behind in getting my portfolio update written, which will summarize my results for Q1. The DGI For The DIY portfolio had another stellar quarter, with dividend income up nearly 27% over 2016. I’m looking forward to breaking things out to see where the big increases came from.

Some other article ideas that I hope to get out in the coming weeks include an updated look at the consumer discretionary sector, a review of my dividend growth predictions for April, a blog post (that I hope will become a regular feature) about some of the good articles I’ve come across about DGI, and some general site content updates on pages that I’ve started but haven’t finished building out.

Your Thoughts?

I’d love to hear feedback on what you like or think could use improvement on this site. Also feel free to recommend other content ideas that you would like to see added.

If you have any other questions about investing or ideas on individual stocks or sectors that might be of interest I’d love to hear those as well.

Happy Easter!