The first resource that I have been using for several years is the list of Dividend Champions, Contenders and Challengers, that used to be maintained by Dave Fish. Dave had painstakingly updated and improved on that monster spreadsheet every month for a decade! Unfortunately, Dave passed away last month. The list is now published by someone else.
The site also includes links to some international dividend growth stock lists focusing on UK, Canada, Swedish securities.
The second resource I have leveraged is Morningstar. I have found Morningstar to be helpful in providing a quick ten year snapshot of a company’s financials. Under the following link, you can view the ten year financials for Johnson & Johnson.
Morningstar also has some good articles on general investing. They also have some newsletters targeting various strategies, which could be helpful to some readers. They had a guy named Josh Peters, who frequently had interviews on dividend investing, but he has since left to manage a dividend mutual fund.
Another helpful resource that shows historical financial information for US and Canadian companies that goes further than the past ten years is from The Globe and Mail. Here you can find a summary of the historical financials for Johnson & Johnson going as far back as 1978
Of course, this is just the beginning for you. I would go back and review quarterly press releases on the company’s website for more information on large changes in earnings per share from year to year.
Alternatively, you can use the SEC website to find old annual and quarterly financial information going as far back as 1994. In my research, I have leveraged SEC’s website extensively to obtain information on companies that are no longer publicly traded. Those filings have a lot of detail, management comments and footnotes for the really serious full-time investor out there. I doubt most readers would benefit from reading historical footnotes, but if that is your passion, who am I to be the obstacle to your true happiness. In the case of Johnson & Johnson, you can find annual, quarterly and other SEC filings going as far back as 1994.
I have recently started using the following resources more:
Gurufocus - It shows historical data for companies I am researching, going as far back as decades. For example, I can chart earnings per share data for Johnson & Johnson going as far back as 1991. Just select a metric from the drop down menu, and you can find things like historical revenue, number of shares outstanding etc. The site also shows a good collection of articles on investing.
I have found the following resources invaluable in identifying dividend increases:
Wall Street Journal – The Wall Street Journal offers a breadth of information on a variety of topics. I find their dividend section to be very helpful in monitoring dividend increases. However, this section sometimes is late by a few days in reporting dividend increases. In addition, when companies like PepsiCo announce their intention to do a dividend increases a few months in advance, WSJ reports it when declared many weeks later.
Seeking Alpha – Seeking Alpha is quickly becoming a one stop shop for the needs of dividend investors. You have articles, comment sections and news on important topics occurring in real-time. They also have a feed of dividend news as they happen. You can learn pretty much all notable dividend news such as dividend declarations and dividend increases by scrolling through that feed. The problem is that they just decided to charge $200/year to access the site.
Street Insider - This is another source that is paid. However it offers a real-time view of dividend announcements such as dividend increases and dividend cuts.
I used to frequent Yahoo Finance religiously over the past twenty years. The site is helpful to me, because I can create portfolios that include various metrics such as P/E ratio, dividend yields, prices etc. This makes it super easy to navigate the list of dividend champions, and screen for quality companies using my entry criteria.
In addition, I use Yahoo Finance to obtain historical quotes and dividends. I always check the data however, in case there are issues with the data.
Unfortunately, Yahoo! Finance has been unveiling new features which in my opinion have made the site less usable.
If you like to socialize and interact with other dividend investors, there are several online communities that would get the job done.
Dividend Growth Forum
Seeking Alpha comments under articles on dividend investing
Drip Investing
Motley Fool
Morningstar Income & Dividend Investing
I also want to warn you that this is not an all inclusive list of resources for dividend growth investors. I read blogs and follow people on Twitter, who frequently mention items in real-time that may not be available in other resources above. In addition, I also use the services of my broker, which shows me expected dividend increases for companies I own.
Going through all of these resources takes time and effort. This is where the value proposition of this site comes up - I read that all for you, and then synthesize the information by adding some actionable steps.
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