Investor fervor for artificial intelligence (AI) keeps making dividend stocks look downright dumpy. Over the past 12 months, the S&P 500 has returned an eye-popping 29.8%, while the Kiplinger Dividend 15, the list of our favorite dividend-paying stocks, returned an average of 13.4%. Just three — Broadcom (AVGO), Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) and recent addition U.S. Bancorp (USB) — beat the market.
What a world we live in, when a 13% annual return is a middling performance. Of course, much of the story remains the mega-cap Magnificent Seven technology stocks that continue to drive the returns of the S&P 500 and now make up an outsize proportion of this primary measure of the markets. Although five of the seven pay teeny-tiny dividends, the stocks are not on anyone's list of income investments.
