Investing in dividend growth stocks is a long-term proposition. One of the beauties of following a dividend growth strategy is that you don't have to watch your portfolio or the market on a daily basis. For the most part, daily, monthly and yearly movements are just noise in the system.
My normal practice is to refresh my analytical spreadsheets each Friday with updated price information on the 210+ stocks that I follow. Even then, I don't normally look at the value of my portfolio or the performance of individual stocks.
However, each quarter I update my income portfolio's performance and benchmark it against the S&P 500 and other portfolios. At that time I will look at performance of individual stocks to understand the overall performance the portfolio.
Saturday, I updated my Income Portfolio's performance for the fourth quarter. Building on that, here are my Dividend Growth Portfolio's top and bottom 5 performers for the year through December 31, 2011:
Top Performers
#5. Consolidated Edison, Inc. (
ED)
Consolidated Edison, Inc. is an electric and gas utility holding company that serves parts of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Utilities had a great year in 2011. ED led the the way for me.
Yield: 4.1% | 2011 Total Return: 30.6%
#4. Chevron Corporation (
CVX)
Chevron Corporation is a global integrated oil company (formerly ChevronTexaco) that has interests in exploration, production, refining and marketing, and petrochemicals. I've held a position in this stock since December 2008. It has been very kind to me by returning 23.9% in 2011.
Yield: 3.9% | 2011 Total Return: 31.1%
#3.