DD Highlights & Model Portfolios

D.D. Highlights
A printable report that provides an executive summary of D.D.'s most popular features including the Monthly Commentary, Model Portfolios, Dividend Monsters (50 highest yielding dividend payers), Corporate Bond portfolio, and "D.D. at a Glance," which lists all followed stocks including dividend yields and our buy/sell ratings. D.D. Highlights is issued monthly, typically on the fifth of each month. D.D. Highlights is easy to print because it’s formatted as a PDF file. You probably already have the needed PDF reader installed in your computer. If you don’t, you can download it here for free: http://get.adobe.com/reader/ 

Model Portfolios
We offer four Model Portfolios for subscribers that either don't have the time or the interest to dig into D.D.'s voluminous offerings to develop their own portfolios. The four portfolios, each containing seven stocks selected from our Industry and Specialty portfolios, are:

• Monthly Paying Retirement: A diversified portfolio of closed-end funds and ETFs that pay dividends monthly.

• Conservative: For investors whose top priority is minimizing risk. These stocks are selected first for the lowest possible risk with diversification between industries, then for the highest dividend yields.

• Growth & Income: Growth stocks that also pay significant dividends. The main selection criteria are minimum 2.5% expected dividend yield, minimum 10% forecast annualized earnings growth, and diversification between industries.

• High Yield/Speculative: Stocks and funds offering high potential returns, but too risky to include in our other portfolios.

You can see the recent returns for the four portfolios by clicking here.

To use our Model Portfolios, pick one or more portfolio and invest equal dollar amounts in each of the seven securities. Don’t "cherry pick." Every portfolio has its stars and clunkers, but you can’t know which is which in advance. Every few months, check the dollar value of your holdings and rebalance if necessary. We strive to minimize Model Portfolio turnover. Any changes are announced around the 3rd or 4th of each month. In a typical month, from all four portfolios, we might replace one or two picks. That is, we might replace one or two of the 28 securities. There would be more turnover when market conditions change significantly.

We use different qualification requirements for our Model Portfolios than for our Industry and Specialty portfolios. Thus, when we delete a pick from one of our Model Portfolios, that security might still be "buy" rated in its home Industry or Specialty portfolio.