Safe Dividend Investing
In 2000, I lost $300,000 in mutual funds that an investment advisor had put my lifesavings into.... I lost it because I had entrusted it to an industry that does not educate investors nor encourage them to look closely at what that industry is doing with their money..... I set out to find a better, safer way to invest..... My podcasts relate to what I learned in creating a generous, reliable income and in growing my wealth.... A few of the more important lessons I learned and explore are:.... (1) It is critical that you become a self-directed investor.....(2) If you can not easily measure the risk and potential in an investment, then do not invest in it. This excludes from your portfolio bundled investment devices, like mutual funds, ETFs and Index funds,..... (3) Financially strong companies who have paid “good dividends” for decades will continue to stay strong and continue to pay good dividends because it is both part of their "character" and in their executives selfish interest.....(4) Diversification is critical. Investing equally in the best 20 strong dividend stocks is the ideal.....A portfolio of 20 limits your risk in any one stock to 5% of your wealth..... No matter how strong you think a stock is, do not fall in love with it..... I have lived very well off my steady dividend income for 18 years, through two market crashes and one pandemic. I have watched my portfolio’s capital more than triple from where I started, despite taking out a generous dividend income every year to live on... In charts, for my second investment book,(Safer Better Dividend Investing), I spent months scoring all 628 dividend stocks paying dividends of 6% or greater traded on the TSX, NYSE and the NASDAQ. I discovered dozens of stocks that can provide not only a generous dividend income but outstanding capital growth.....Financial independence is realizable for careful, patient, dividend investors.
Safe Dividend Investing
Podcast 254 - WHAT DO AI STOCKS HAVE IN COMMON WITH ELECTRICITY : NVIDIA, GOOGLE, META, MICROSOFT, ALIBABA, COREWEAVE, ADOBE
Welcome to Safe Dividend Investing’s Podcast # 254, on December 20th of 2025. My name is Ian Duncan MacDonald, and I am an author of six investment books.
I continue to working away on my latest book which will be called “Achieving Financial Independence Safely. 200 NYSE Stocks - Analyzed and Scored”. I am now down to the editing and formatting. However, I did add a new chapter to recognize the tremendous impact that AI stocks are having upon the stock market. I have anticipated that the readers of the new book would question why nothing on AI stocks would have appeared in the book.
I found it interesting in researching this new chapter on AI stocks how similar an impact it has had upon the population was to when electricity was first introduced in the late eighteen hundreds. The same fears were there about a technology that you might not be able to control.
My books are not get-rich-quick books. They are about taking a little time to carefully seek out financially strong companies with long histories of paying ever rising high dividends accompanied by rising share prices. Diversification and patience win out in investing. The objective is achieving that steady, reliable income that results in financial independence for the rest of your life.
My plan is to release this new book at a greatly reduced price for ten days. If you wish to be informed of this preliminary release date, please email me at imacd@informus.ca.
Please, visit my website www.informus.ca if you wish to learn more about me and my writing.
Ian Duncan MacDonald
Author and 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
PODCAST 254
SAFE DIVIDEND INVESTING
Greetings to investors all around the world. Welcome to Safe Dividend Investing’s Podcast # 254, on December 20th of 2025. My name is Ian Duncan MacDonald, and I am an author of six investment books.
I am now down to editing and formatting the new Investment book. Hopefully in a week or so I will be able to forward it to printing. Soon after, I should be able to inform all those who have requested to be notified of its release so they could purchase it at the initial 10-day discounted price. If you have not made such a request, please send an email to imacd@informus.ca.
I have made a slight change in the name of the book. It is now going to be called “Achieving Financial Independence Safely. 200 NYSE exchange Stocks – Analyzed and Scored”.
Every day we are bombarded with AI hype by the media. So, I have also added a new chapter on AI stocks. The media excitedly reports how AI could have as much an impact on our lives as when electricity was introduced more than 125 years ago. Fears of how AI could destroy mankind are excitedly predicted.
These fears are very similar to the hysteria that surrounded the introduction of electricity in the late 1800s. People were afraid of electrocution to such an extent that they feared they could be instantly struck dead by leaning against a lamp post. Medical professionals linked electricity to various ailments. A catastrophic loss of jobs was predicted. These fears were caused by the tension between the promise of innovation and the fear of a new "unrestrained demon" that humans could not control.
I am anticipating that investors who are about to build a portfolio of financially strong stocks are predictably going to ask why the proposed selection of stocks analyzing in my books does not include any AI stocks. It seemed prudent to add a chapter that addresses this question.
I concentrated attention on the stocks my research identified as the leading AI stocks. Of these the most outstanding AI stock is Nvidia. Incredibly, the value of its shares exceeded 4.3 trillion dollars. To appreciate the immense size of its value, consider that only 4 countries in the world, the USA, China, Germany and Japan that have a Gross Domestic Product exceeding 4.3 trillion dollars. Four years ago, Nvidia’s stock was trading at $29.64. It is now $174.70. Last year its revenue more than doubled to $130.5 billion dollars.
Why would anyone not want Nvidia in their portfolio? One big reason might be that many value investors like to invest in companies that see shareholders as partners. To grow and survive companies need to invest money back into the business. However, for stability it is also in the best interest of a company to share their profits with the shareholders of the company by paying good dividends. Investors are the owners of the company.
While Nvidia does pay a dividend, it is a yield of only 0.02%. This is a long way from the 5% dividend yields by those financially strong, established stocks recommended and identified in my books.
When you seek financial independence, you want to invest in steady, reliable, companies who will both grow your dividend income and provide a steady rise in share price. Your intention is to hold such stocks for decades not days, weeks, months or only a few years.
The only way you could now realize income from owning Nvidia shares would be to sell the shares. Hopefully for more than was paid for them. The sale then necessitates finding another stock to invest in. This establishes a habit of speculative buying and selling of shares. Trying to time these transactions to your best advantage is stressful and almost impossible. It can take only one mistake or unforeseen circumstance to wipe out a speculator’s lifetime of gains.
Spectacularly high share price growth caused by a company’s unique product often causes greed and envy among its competitors. Wise investors recognize that prolonging a monopoly that caused spectacular growth is just about impossible. Nvidia’s spectacular growth is already under attack.
Chinese manufacturers appear to be the competitors that will bring out a less expensive, more efficient high performance AI chips than Nvidia. One of them, Huawei, has already brought out chip, that is reported to be faster and more powerful than Nvidia’s chip.
Will we see with AI chips what has happened with electric vehicles? The Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer BYD in just a few years has become the largest manufacturer of electric vehicles in the world. In the last year it produced 4,036, 566 vehicles eclipsing Tesla’s 1,787,944 production.
BYD’s growth is understandable when you learn they are selling their cars in China for less than $10,000 and in Australia for $19,000. This is less than half the price of other electrical vehicle manufacturers. The American car manufacturers have used tariffs to keep BYD’s cars out of the US market. However, forcing consumers in a capitalist society to pay several multiple more for an electrical vehicle than they need to, is not a sustainable strategy.
A similar challenge will soon face Nvidia. It is now very profitable with a high operating margin of 58.84%. However, according to their accountants the book value of a share is only $3.24 which is far, far below the current share price of $174.70 that investors paid to buy 80,000,000 in one day this week. Does this low book value indicate Nvidia has a mountain of debt? IS Nvidia an overpriced, speculative stock whose share price will decline as competitors gain momentum.
The other five AI stocks have similar profiles. For example, Google, has a share price of $303.42 and a book value of $26.62. It too pays a nominal dividend yield of only 0.28%.
Microsoft was founded in the nineteen seventies. Its share price is now $484.81 with a book value of $46.20. Its dividend yield is 0.75%. At one time, it was a penny stock.
CoreWeave, at $67.03 is the least expensive of these AI stocks, but it too has a low book value of $2.82. It pays no dividend. With an operating margin of 3.63% it is much less profitable than the other AI stocks. However, it still trades over 19 million shares in a day. This is outstanding for a company that was only listed on the stock exchange in the last year. However, its newness was evident when I scored it. CoreWeave’s IDM stock score was only 38. All the other AI stocks had good scores over 60.
At $664.43 Meta Platforms had the highest share price of these AI stocks and the highest book value at $72.07. Its dividend yield percent was only 0.32%.
Adobe, is the only one of the AI stocks that is trading significantly lower than it was four years ago. Its share price is now $354.77. Four years ago, it was $568.06. It has a book value of $27.77 and pays no dividend.
The last of the AI stocks is Alibaba. Unlike the others, its book value of $62.09 is closest to its current share price of $148.07. Its price four years ago was $118.66. While its dividend yield of 0.71 was low its IDM score of 69 was the highest of these AI stocks.
In the AI chapter in the new book, you will see the same full details on these AI stock as are displayed for all 200 stocks analyzed and scored in the book.
That’s all for this week.