Dividends: Expert Guides and Resources

Dividend investing is nothing new. However, following a dividend-investment strategy is new to many modern investors who've been focused solely on growth investing. If you count yourself among this crowd or are just starting out and plan on investing in dividend stocks, you need to know how to develop your strategy, find and evaluate potentially good dividend stocks, manage your portfolio, and avoid the most common and critical mistakes.

Some people are better at bargain hunting than others. What usually separates the clueless from the pros is that the pros know what something is worth. The same is true for finding bargains on Wall Street. You need to know what a stock is worth, and low price isn’t always a bargain.Value investors hunt for bargains, but they buy only after performing some careful research and crunching the numbers.

Tools, data, and analysis previously accessible only to investment professionals are now readily available on the Web 24/7 and are better and faster than ever. Many Web sites even provide free stock screeners that enable you to search for stocks by price, dividend yield, price -to-earnings ratio (P/E), earnings per share (EPS), and more.

Dividend stock investing may seem daunting, but with a little knowledge of how to find and pick promising dividend-paying stocks, you can invest in these stocks and reap dividends like a pro. Your portfolio will thank you.Researching your dividend stock picks with important formulasAs with all stocks, you should research the dividend stocks you’re considering before you buy them to ensure they’re good investments.

If you are investing online and have a taxable brokerage account, you need to understand how dividends work. Remember that a dividend is a distribution of a portion of a company's earnings to some of its shareholders. Dividends can be issued as cash payments, stock shares, or even other property.Dividends are paid based on how many shares you own or dividends per share (DPS).

A balance sheet presents a financial snapshot of what the company owns and owes at a single point in time, typically at the end of each quarter. It’s essentially a net worth statement for a company. The left or top side of the balance sheet lists everything the company owns: its assets, also known as debits. The right or lower side lists the claims against the company, called liabilities or credits, and shareholder equity.

With dividend stocks, you have two ways to win: when the share value rises and when the company cuts you a dividend check, paying you a portion of its profits. If the share price rises by 4 percent, and the company pays a 3-percent dividend, you pocket a 7-percent profit, minus taxes, of course. (Or you can reinvest your dividends to buy more shares.

Each year, typically in January or February, but sometimes as late as early April, you can expect to receive a late Christmas present from each of your dividend stocks and mutual funds: a 1099-DIV. The 1099-DIV reports all your taxable income distributions from the fund so you can account for them appropriately on your tax return.

Mutual funds are pass-through investment vehicles: If the funds pass at least 90 percent of the portfolio's profits to the shareholders, the fund's tax obligation gets passed through to the shareholders as well. If the fund holds any income, it must pay taxes on that, so most funds pass through 100 percent of their profits.