Hedging against inflation with dividend-paying stocks + MORE Apr 1st

Cut the Crap Investing founder Dale Roberts shares financial headlines and offers context for Canadian investors. 

Not good-bye, but see you soon

After writing this week’s column, I will no longer make sense. My wife will offer that I stopped making sense a long time ago, but that might be in a general sense  

This will be my last installment for the “Making sense of the markets” column. I am stepping aside. The weekly column will continue with a new writer, soon to be announced. 

“Making sense of the markets” has been the best experience of my investment writing career. As you may know, in my previous life, I was an advertising writer and creative director. Those are two drastically different writing styles and disciplines. 

In advertising, we are storytellers, where creativity and surprise rules. That said, the advertising experience greatly helped me prepare for my investment adviser stint at Tangerine Investments. The combined advertising and advisor experience perhaps created a different kind of perspective and background that shaped my investment writing…

Dividend-paying stocks typically don’t get much attention, but that’s changing as investors look for ways to protect their wealth in the face of market turbulence and inflation. Investing in dividend-paying stocks is one proven way to both grow your portfolio and cushion it against loss. That’s because even if markets are bumpy and the underlying share prices of your dividend stocks are down, you still collect dividend income. High-paying dividend stocks can also help preserve purchasing power against rising inflation.

A little context: Investors may not realize it, but dividend stocks already generate more than half their returns, as the majority of companies listed on market indexes pay dividends. In the past, it was largely utilities, telecom companies and banks that issued dividends. Now, tech stocks, retail stocks—all types of companies—issue dividends, so long as they are in a position to do so. This is another reason dividend-paying stocks are attractive: They inspire confidence that a company has a healthy cash flow, revenues and profits…