I didn't know we had so much overlap at the top: JNJ, WEC, LNT, and I am wanting to buy AEP. I did some work for friends who wanted to invest in the stock market, so I created a spreadsheet of JNJ's price and total value both from a single purchase and from the same purchase and reinvesting dividends. I wanted to give them a sense of ups and downs, but long term gains. Big mistake: That 40-year graph of JNJ looks like an exponential function--very few down periods. A real investment success.
In the Fidelity rebuttal I posted about the "error" of investing for income only, I noted that my largest four holdings were JNJ, MCD, LMT, and WM (!). Including dividends, those four were up 200% in my seven years of DGI. I do not consider myself able to pick out "winner" stocks. These are standard DGI stocks. Somebody is doing something right with a strategy like this--or maybe it's just luck.
FWIW, I held a lot of AAPL for 30 years, finally completely transitioning out of it last year, so I have not been a DGI investor and nothing else. At this stage of my life, I just wanted relatively stable, though growing, income and the comfort of being able to pay less attention then required for a small, then large, high tech firm. Make no mistake. I love AAPL. It's just not what I want/need now. |
