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 271 - PROOF - STOCK SCORING CREATES GREAT WEALTH
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Welcome to Safe Dividend Investing’s Podcast # 271 on April 18th of 2026.
My name is Ian Duncan MacDonald, and I am the author of 7 investment books. My seventh investment book, Achieving Financial Independence Safely - 200 NYSE Stocks Analyzed and Scored" became available January 3rd on Amazon. You can easily find it by searching in Amazon or Google for "Ian Duncan MacDonald books". For more information on all my books, stock scoring software and podcasts go to www.informus.ca
In this week's podcast I explore stock scoring. This is objectively measuring the benefits and risks of mathematically comparing one stock with another. There are about 14,000 stocks in North America that you could purchase. Is it possible to select and score all these stocks and narrow you stock purchase down to 20 that are going to give you the best return on your investment over six years?
To prove that stock scoring works I go back to 2020 when I released my book, "Safer Better Dividend Investing". How did the 20 highest scoring stocks identified in that book do over the last six years. You may be surprised.
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
imacd@informus.ca
Podcast 271
18 April 2026
Safe Dividend Investing
PROOF – STOCK SCORING CREATES GREAT WEALTH
Greetings to investors all around the world. Welcome to Safe Dividend Investing’s Podcast #271, recorded on April 18th of 2026. My name is Ian Duncan MacDonald. I am the author of seven investment books. My latest book was “Achieving Financial Independence Safely – 200 NYSE Exchange Stocks Analyzed and Scored”. It was available for delivery from Amazon on January 3rd. Those trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange can go to my book Canadian High Dividend Investing – 215 Scored Stocks.
To learn more about the benefits of my seven investment books, please visit my website www.informus.ca. Alternatively, you can also do a Google search or an Amazon search for "Ian Duncan MacDonald books”. At Amazon you will find sample chapters and reviews by investors.
I have been writing these investment books since 2019. Scoring the stocks in them is one of the most important and useful aspects of the books. Being able to go back to an earlier book to see how a stock’s share price and its risk score has grown or shrunk over several years can be very helpful in making a decision as to whether buy or not buy a stock.
Some who bought my books did not plow through all the data on the hundreds of scored stocks. They just looked at the 20 highest scoring stocks listed in the book and invested in those 20 stocks.
A stock’s score is calculated from 8 information factors such as share price, book value, operating margin and so on. The score is out of a possible 100. Only two or three stocks out of the thousands I have scored have ever scored over 80. I personally avoid stocks scoring under 50 and have seen stocks scores as low as 3. The scoring system is explained in detail in every book.
I have found that the highest scoring stocks do not usually pay the highest dividend yields. Thus, to get a higher dividend return I often select dividend payers scoring in the fifties. The risk is a bit higher, but it can result in my doubling the dividend income that I live on. Many of these stocks will be paying dividend yields between 7 and 10 percent.
How did those investors in 2020 who choose to only invest in the top 20 stocks by score do? Out of curiosity, I selected the 20 highest scoring Canadian stocks from page 321of my book Safer Better Dividend Investing. It was released in 2020. These 20 highest stock scores ranged between 65 and 76. Six of the 20 stocks paid dividend yields under 5%. The lowest was 3.48%.
The stock with the highest score of 76 was the Royal Bank of Canada, stock symbol RY, its share price was $93.08 in 2020. Now its share price is $244.23. A gain of 262% Since 2020 it has paid $32.78 in dividends per share.
In my books I advise investing equal amounts in each of your portfolio’s 20 stocks. A portfolio of twenty stocks was seen by me as being ideal because 20 provides sufficient safe diversification. If one stock’s share price ever fell to zero (which is highly unlikely to ever happen) its impact on your total portfolio wealth would hardly be noticed. It would represent only 5% of the money you invested. With the other 19 financially strong stocks in your portfolio increasing in share price value on average by about 10% a year, the gain of the 19 would easily eclipse the loss of one stock - or even several stocks.
If you had $100,000 to invest in your total portfolio in 2020 and divided that amount equally among your 20 stocks, you would have had $5,000 to invest in Royal Bank shares. This would have allowed you to buy 54 shares. Those 54 shares purchased for $5,000 would now be worth $13,188 plus those 54 shares over the six years would also have generated an additional $1,770 in dividend income. This would have resulted in a return of about $15,000 which is triple your initial $5,000 investment. If you had bought more RYshares each year with that dividend income being generated, it would have been even more.
What about the other 19 highest scoring stocks in the 2020 book? The stock in the 20thor last position was Can West Bank, stock symbol CWB. It had a score of 65.
When I went to look for its current share price I found it was no longer listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange. What happened to CWB? I learned that in 2024 it had been merged into the National Bank. The Can West Bank shareholders got 0.45% of a National Bank share for each of their CWB shares.
Back in 2020 a CWB share was worth $22.88. The $5,000 would have bought 218 shares. Those 218 shares would have been converted into 98 National Bank shares in the 2024 merger. Those 98 shares would now be worth $202.92 each or a total of $19,886.
In addition, CWB was also paying a 5.07% dividend yield. If the six years of dividend income were added to the gain realized this stock would have had a gain of more than 400%.
Interestingly the National Bank was in the 19th position in the list of 20 highest scoring stocks. It was only trading at $62.09 in 2020 compared to its current $202.92 a share.
These two examples that I chose from the list of 20 are just coincidentally banks. Most of the stocks making up the 20 highest scores are not banks. They are stocks like Canadian Natural Resources, stock symbol CNQ; which has risen from $23.93 a share in 2020 to $58.51 a share in 2026. During the last six years it paid out a total of $11.49 per share in dividends. It was in fourth position on the list of 20.
Restaurant Brands stock symbol QSR which was 15 on the list went from$54.17 a share to $107.26 a share in 2026 while accumulating $13.40 in dividend payouts.
Those in 2020 who invested in these 20 highest scoring stocks have done well. They were able to sit back, relax and watch their wealth grow. They did not have to deal with the stresses of speculating on the buying or selling of stocks. For income they received steady reliable dividends.
As share prices increase, I found that dividend payouts usually increased at a faster rate than the share prices. This increase keeps your dividend income well ahead of inflation.
What this analysis of the highest scoring stocks in 2020 proved to me is that the stock scoring software that I give away free to those who buy any of my seven books - works. My objective has always been to give investors the confidence to invest in strong, high dividend stocks whose value they understand. It gives them the patience to wait for their portfolio to increase by several multiples.
That’s all for this week folks.