If you are a sports fan, after viewing or seeing the game, you will likely read the sports pages in the papers. For sports pages, it typically means professional sports. If you are a football fan and the team has a new quarterback, you are expected to cheer and support an essentially losing team because the win column is likely to be lower than the loss column. In the NFL this year there are a number of teams which are in that situation or are in a rebuilding season. Fortunately for the NFL, the teams have a near monopoly position, the teams are generally competitive each season (although winning would be great) and fans go for different reasons than purely for winning football.

Linking to dividend producing stocks, just because a company pays dividends does not mean they will have a winning season every year. However if the company has a near monpoly or quasi-monopoly situation, it can go through a rebuilding year so that the expectation of paying a dividend is a near certainty. The expectation is even in a year where the company is not performing on all cylinders, it will still do very well relative to other companies. Buying dividend producing companies is never a 100% guarantee but it should be close.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time  – to raising questions.