(By Dividend Growth Investor) I am a passive dividend investor. I purchase quality dividend stocks, with the expectations that I will hold on for decades. I do monitor my investments however, and typically sell when one of these three factors occurs. I am not a big fan
of active dividend investing, since it leads to paying taxes on capital gains, transaction costs as well as opens me for the opportunity to make mistakes. Buying a stock that will perform much worse than the stock it just replaced in my portfolio, is one of the items in my decision process that might prevent me from active portfolio management. Dividend investing
is not a black and white process however, which is why investors should sometimes act to break their rules, if the right opportunity arises.
Over the past month I sold almost my entire position
in Con Edison (ED) realizing a substantial profit. I used the proceeds to purchase units of
ONEOK Partners (
OKS). This move resulted in an immediate increase of 10% to the dividend income of the 1.20% or so
of my portfolio that was invested in Con Edison (ED).
I had not added any funds to Con Edison since 2010. The low interest rate environment has pushed many investors to chase high yielding utilities stocks to valuation levels that no longer make sense. Currently, this New York based utility yields 4.10%, and trades at a P/E ratio of 17 times earnings. My average cost on the stock was $44.61, bringing my effective
yield on cost to be 5.40%. Unfortunately, Consolidated Edison has been unable to grow earnings much over the past decade, as EPS increased from $3.13 in 2002 to $3.57 in 2011. The annual dividend has been increased at an annual rate of 2 cents/share since 1996, and is projected to reach $2.44/share in 2013. As a regulated utility, Con Edison's profits are limited by the amount it can charge its customers, which in turn is determined by regulators. Lately, regulators haven't been particularly generous about utility price hikes, which does not bode well for revenue and profit growth in the long run.