Safe Dividend Investing
Safe Dividend Investing
Podcast 214 : This Week's Leaders are: TARGET CORP - WHITECAP RESOURCES - SUNCOR ENERGY -APA CORP
Welcome to Podcast 214 of Safe Dividend Investing on 29 March 2025.
Be sure to visit the transcript for this podcast to find the detailed information on each stock that was scored.
You may also want visit Podcast 210 where in the printed transcript, you will find Chapter 4 from my investment guidebooks. It explains in easily understood language how the IDM stock scoring system works. Using this information you can manually score any stock you encounter. The IDM stock scoring software that I provide to those who purchase my investment guide books is derived from this chapter. The software just makes scoring stocks faster and easier.
The first 190 Safe Dividend Investing podcasts answered hundreds of questions about stocks that I had received from my podcast listeners and the readers of my other publications. Starting with Podcast 191 the the weekly podcasts have usually dealt with identifying the week's 10 dividend stocks whose recent exceptional share price growth on the New York and Toronto stock exchanges may have made them worth considering as possible portfolio acquisitions. It is also an opportunity for me to bring to the listeners attention information that I think may assist them in creating and managing their self-directed stock portfolio.
At www.informus.ca for information you can learn more about my six investment guide books.
IAN
imacd@informus.ca
Ian Duncan MacDonald
Author, Artist, Commercial Risk Consultant,
President of Informus Inc
2 Vista Humber Drive
Toronto, Ontario
Canada, M9P 3R7
Toronto Telephone - 416-245-4994
New York Telephone - 929-800-2397
imacd@informus.ca
Pod 214- 29 MARCH 2025
Safe Dividend Investing-
Greetings to listeners all around the world. Welcome to Safe Dividend Investing’s Podcast # 214, on 29 of March, 2025. My name is Ian Duncan MacDonald.
In the first 190 Podcasts of Safe Dividend Investing, you can find answers to hundreds of investment questions.
Starting with Podcast 191 the podcast format was changed. I now bring to your attention each week, from the more than 12,000 stocks available in North America, the five U.S. and the five Canadian high dividend stocks whose share prices gained the most this week
For this podcast I have once again scored all 10 of the stocks and provided details for each in the attached transcript. Each stock’s score is calculated out of a possible 100. The highest score I have ever calculated out of the thousands I have scored is an 86. The lowest was a 3. I personally prefer stocks scoring over 50 in my portfolio.
In the previous Podcast 210 you can see exactly how scores are calculated for each data element and why these elements were chosen. This information allows you to manually score any stock you encounter.
The Stock Selectors Used for This Week’s 10 choices were those with:
(1) Trading volumes exceeding 431.07k in US shares and 431.07k in Canadian shares.
(2) US dividend yields exceeding 4% and Canadian yields exceeding 4%
(3) A weekly share price gain exceeding 1% in the US stocks and 1% in Canadian stocks.
(4) US operating margins exceeding 1% and 16% in Canadian stocks
(5) A share price exceeding $8.15 for US stocks and $ 8.15 for Canadian stocks.
The 5 US common stocks that met these 5 criteria on the New York Stock and NASDQ Exchanges were:
1 . Golden Ocean Group (GOGGL) ………………………….SCORE = 64
2 . Verizon Communications Inc (VZ)………………………SCORE = 63
3 . APA Corp (APA) ………………………………………………SCORE = 67
4. The Kraft Heinz Company (KHC)………...................SCORE = 66
5. Target Corporation (TGT).......................................SCORE = 65
The 5 Canadian common stocks meeting the criteria on the Toronto Stock Exchange were:
1. Whitecap Resources Inc (WCP)……………………… SCORE = 68
2. Northland Power Inc (NPL)……………………………..SCORE = 59
3. Endeavour Mining PLC (EDV)………………………….SCORE = 54
4. Veren Inc (VRN)……………………………………………SCORE = 60
5. Suncor Energy Inc (SU) ………………………………….SCORE = 68
DISPLAY OF US STOCK SCORE CALCULATIONS
S7.16TK = Stock Symbol 1 = Price $ 2 = 4yr ago Price $ 3= $ book value 4= advisor buys # 5= advisor strong buys # 6= div. yield % 7=operating margin % 8 = trade volume # 9 = P/E ratio
STOCK 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
| GOGL | 8.36 | 7.16 | 9.53 | 1 | 0 | 7.18 | 32.46 | 7M | 7.5x
| VZ | 44.93 | 58.30 | 23.57 | 6 | 0 | 6.03 | 21.23 | 20M | 10.8x
| APA | 20.92 | 18.85 | 14.45 | 3 | 2 | 4.78 | 22.50 | 7M | 9.3x
| KHC | 30.24 | 40.03 | 41.16 | 2 | 0 | 5.29 | 6.20 | 8M | 13.4x
| TGT | 103.65 | 200.72 | 32.19 | 12 | 1 | 4.32 | 5.22 | 10M | 11.7x
DISPLAY OF CANADIAN SCORE CALCULATIONS
STK = Stock Symbol 1 = Price $ 2= 4yr ago Price $ 3= $ book value 4= advisor buys # 5= advisor strong buys # 6= div. yield % 7=operating margin % 8 = trade volume # 9 = P/E ratio
STOCK 1 2 54.92 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
| WCP | 9.31 | 5.75 | 9.78 | 3 | 3 | 7.84 | 28.01 | 4M | 6.8x
| NPI | 19.68 | 45.45 | 16.10 | 5 | 1 | 6.10 | 34.65 | 800K | 19.0z
| EDV | 33.93 | 26.63 | 15.85 | 9 | 1 | 4.86 | 13.75 | 500K | -19.7x
| VRN | 9.52 | 5.46 | 11.05 | 6 | 1 | 4.83 | 13.76 | 145K | 20.7x
| SU | 54.92 | 27.02 | 35.77 | 8 | 0 | 4.15 | 17.49 | 6M | 11.7x
HIGHS AND LOWS
While scoring these US and Canadian stocks I found the following interesting:
The most expensive stock was < Target Corporation>at < $103.65>and < Golden Ocean Group > was the least expensive at <$8.36>.
The most buy recommendations by analysts were <12> for <Target Corporation > and the least number of recommendations were for < Golden Ocean Group > with <1>buy recommendations.
One stock led with <3>strong buy recommendations and once again it was < Golden Ocean Group >.Four stocks had no strong buys.
The highest Book Value was for < Suncor Energy > at <$35.77> and the lowest was for < Golden Ocean Group > at < $9.53>
The highest number of shares traded was < Target Corporation > with <10 million> and the lowest number of traded was <145 thousand> for <Veren Inc>
The highest operating margin was for <Northland Powers Inc > at<34.65 %> and the lowest was for < Target Corporation > with at <5.22%>.
The best price-to-earnings ratio of <6.8x > was for <Whitecap Resources > and the lowest was a minus 19.7 x for <Endeavour Mining>.
The stock with the highest IDM score of<68 > was <Suncor Energy >. The lowest score was a <54>for < Endeavour Mining >.
If you have not already obtained the stock scoring software that I supply free to those who purchase my investment guidebooks (which are available at Amazon.com), please visit my website www.informus.cawhere you can learn more about safe investing. For those who don’t read books that website can give you a basic understanding of a safer approach to selecting and buying stocks.
FEAR OF LOSING ALL YOUR MONEY BY INVESTING STOCKS
Many who would like to invest in the stock market do not because they fear losing all the money that they would invest. They ask me how I overcame my fear of investing in stocks. First, I assure them that it is impossible to lose all your money in the stock market if you carefully invest the way I do. This means investing equally in 20 financially strong companies, paying dividends greater than 5% with long histories of ever rising share prices and dividend payouts.
Yes, a few of the share prices of the 20 stocks I have purchased may drop below my purchase price for periods of time while others may double or triple in value at the same time. What is important is the portfolio’s total results not its individual stocks. I will explain more about this way of investing in the transcript that is attached to this podcast.
My lack of fear of losing all my money by investing in stocks is based on my fifty years in developing commercial risk scoring systems. They predicted which of the 2 million businesses in my database would fail to pay their suppliers. I saw that over 95% of 2,000,000 companies paid their suppliers in full.
The typical supplier had thousands of customers. The chances of a large percentage of their customers not paying then were so small that when it did happen the supplier would write the account off to bad debt and see it as a cost of doing business. They recognized that if they had zero bad debt that their credit granting policies were too tight and they were losing out in making sales that would ultimately hurt their profits. . In the same way you cannot make a profitable income in the stock market if you are not invested.
While they were extending perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars in credit to a new customer, these commercial risk managers had very limited data to consult in making their decision to take a chance on granting credit to the company. A stock investor has access to a hundred times more free, easily accessible data to base a stock risk decision on. All my publications and my stock scoring software are devoted to showing investors where to find and use this free, easily accessed information on stocks. It takes only a few minutes to do a basic risk assessment of a stock.
Why does analysis work? It works because human beings are creatures of habit. Human beings make the revenue and expense decisions that result in a company making a profit. Dividends are paid out of profits. By looking at the trends of share prices and dividend payouts of a company over many years, you can predict its future financial strength.
Unfortunately, the perfect stock does not exist. You must still use some judgment to pick what you believe are the “best” dividend stocks for your portfolio. There is always some compromise between strength and dividend income. The stock scoring software I supply to my book readers is a big help in making this compromise. I believe that the only way anyone could possibly lose all their money in the stock market is because they were not sufficiently diversified in the stocks they acquired, and they did not spend the few minutes it takes to determine the strength of each stock they own.
BACKGROUND
Investment companies work hard to convince the public that they could never invest profitably without allowing the financial industry to nibble away at a client’s life savings for the rest of their lives. The objective of advisors is to transfer as much money from your pocket to the pocket of the financial institution that employs them.
I knew 24 years ago that I had to find a better way to invest when I saw a $300,000 loss in the mutual funds an investment advisor had put my life savings into. Since then, I have learned if you are patient and disciplined you can easily grow your portfolio as a self-directed investor without paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees over your lifetime to the investment industry parasites.
My early research quickly showed me that most investors are speculators who see their wealth destroyed when their bet on a stock increasing in price falls below their purchase price. With such speculative churning encouraged by the investment industry, it seemed obvious to me that no one can accurately predict future share prices.
I became a successful self-directed investor by carefully selecting and buying 20 strong, high dividend stocks through my bank’s online self-directed investment platform.
Why have I never been disappointed in my income or my capital gain from my 20 stocks? Because my financially strong stocks have paid ever increasing dividend payments out of their company profits.
While share prices are determined by impulsive speculators making guesses, my dividend payouts are the result of the wise revenue and expense decisions of the experienced managers of the companies whose shares I own.
By looking at free, accessible records that go back for decades, anyone can easily see before they buy a share how that stock’s fluctuating share price has had little or no impact on a stock’s rising dividend payouts.
What do I do when a market crash comes along, and the share price of my stocks, like all stocks, may drop by 50%? I relax and do nothing because I live off my dividends. Those dividends are paid throughout the crash as regularly as they have always been paid by these strong stocks. I know from experiencing the last three market crashes that the share prices of my 20 financially strong stocks w, high values. During the crash I pay my monthly bills with my dividend income just as I have always done.
The idea the investment industry promotes that your portfolio must shrink in value after you retire is meant to scare you into buying more of their investment products. The value of my portfolio has grown by several multiples into the 7 figures and is still growing.
I go for years without selling any of the stocks in my portfolio while realizing a dividend income of 6 to 8 percent each year of the value of my portfolio. Most years the share prices of my 20 strong companies can also increase by about 12%. These rising share prices often cause the company’s managers to proudly increase their dividend payouts to maintain their stock’s historically high dividend yield percentages. That has kept my dividend income well ahead of inflation. You too can also build a strong dividend portfolio just like I did.
Until next week’s podcast this is Ian Duncan MacDonald encouraging you to become a successful self-directed investor.
Any questions and comments can be sent to imacd@informus.ca.