In our most recent article on “Dogs of the Dow: A Look Back at 2015 & Forward to 2016”, we highlighted the stocks that are part of the Dow Jones Industrial Average that “…an investor annually select[s] for investment the ten Dow Jones Industrial Average stocks whose dividend is the highest fraction of their price [dividend yield] (wikipedia).”
Within the context of this concept, picking the ten highest yielding stocks of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, there is an important qualitative element that is implied by using the Dow. Michael O’Higgins, author of the 1991 book Beating the Dow which outlined the idea later called “Dogs of the Dow”, said the following of the blue chip index:
“As the most popular indicator of market activity, the Dow is itself an influential barometer of the market and economic conditions. Individually, the 30 stocks that make up the Dow industrials are among the most widely held, widely analyzed, and widely publicized in the world. They are also among the biggest and the strongest. Combined, the 30 Dow components have assets of around 2.5 trillion dollars, nearly five million employees, and sales that exceed the gross national product of every country in the world except China, Germany, India, Japan and the United States.
“These prime companies may gain, lose, spin off, acquire, merge, rename themselves, reorganize, even drop out of the Dow, but they are an integral and vital part of our economic system, and in one form or another they are here to stay.
“The Dow companies and their products and services are household names to most people.”
The very fact that the companies from the Dow Industrials is limited to only 30 widely followed companies is what makes the concept “work”. This strategy for investing gets extremely thin on performance when applied to the S&P 500 or any other “broad” index. Part of the reason for this is the fact that some companies that are part of the S&P 500 Index aren’t at a “blue chip” status, yet. Therefore, the whole point of using the Dow Jones Industrial Average is to isolate the best companies to invest in regardless of the market conditions. Concerns regarding diversification are addressed here.
Understanding the above commentary about why the Dow Industrials are used, we are now going to apply the same concept to three different categories of stocks within the Toronto Stock Exchange Composite Index.
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