The father of value investing, Benjamin Graham suggested choosing stocks with “uninterrupted [dividend] payments for at least the past 20 years.” Stocks in the S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrat Index follow the same idea, but go one step further. This is a group of stocks in the S&P 500 Index that have paid and increased dividends for 25 consecutive years. The index currently has 65 constituents. You can invest in the full list of Dividend Aristocrats through the ProShares S&P 500 Aristocrat ETF (NOBL). The top sectors are Industrials, Consumer Staples, Materials and Health Care.
The downloadable Dividend Aristocrats Excel Spreadsheet contains the sector, current stock price, market capitalization, enterprise value, EV/EBIT, P/E, P/FCF, Dividend yield, Dividend payout ratio for each stock in the index. The spreadsheet is updated weekly.
Earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT), Earnings and Free Cash Flow (FCF) are three-year averages. The idea behind using average earnings comes from Graham and Dodd’s classic text Security Analysis, where they argued for smoothing a firm’s earnings. Graham and Dodd noted that one-year earnings were too volatile to evaluate a firm’s true earnings power.
