Top 10 Dividend-Yielding Stocks: Morningstar

When Morningstar screens for top dividend-paying stocks among the its Ultimate Stock-Pickers’ portfolios, analysts make an initial list of names, according to a recent blog post by associate equity analyst Verushka Shetty and equities strategist Eric Compton.

They then narrow it down by focusing on firms they believe have maintainable competitive advantages that should allow them to generate the excess returns necessary to continue their dividends over the long term.

They also look for firms they think have lower uncertainty regarding future cash flows. They do this by screening for widely held holdings by at least five of Morningstar’s top managers that are yielding more than the S&P 500, that have wide or narrow economic moats and that have either low or medium fair-value uncertainty ratings.

Following completion of the filtering process, analysts create two different tables. One reflects the top 10 stocks with the highest dividend yields; the other lists stocks that are widely held by Ultimate Stock-Pickers and pay higher dividends than the S&P 500, which was yielding 1.74% in March.

See the gallery for the top 10 dividend-yielding stocks of Morningstar’s Ultimate Stock-Pickers, based on stock prices and Morningstar rate data from March 16.

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