On Friday, in the Globe and Mail, Peter Aston vice President of client services at Recognia Inc. looked at US large cap stocks. In all comparisons first he had to narrow the field with different criteria. The first criteria was minimum market capitalization of $ 5 billion – this is an effort to focus on greater stability and safety. This reduced the market to 10% of the field.  The second step is to look for companies with a price-to earnings ration of less than 15; a 5 year historical earnings-per-share growth rate of greater than 5 %; debt to equity of 1.5 or less; and 5 year historical dividend growth rate of 10% or more.

The data came up with a number of companies which are:

Company                           Symbol          Market     P/E   EPS Growth  Debt      Dividend

Cap B$                 %           to Equity   Growth %

Apple Inc                           AAPL-Q         510.2       14.6      58.1         0.13        330.2

Coach Inc                         COH-N              11.5       12.9      11.7         0.09       137.8

Capital One Financ           COF-N               43.8      11.0     182.2       0.97          49.6

Fifth Third Banc                FITN-Q               17.6      10.3      35.9        0.77          112.9

Aetna Inc                            AET-N              26.5       13.0      15.1        0.58          298.5

Ensco                                 ESV-N               11.8        8.7       13.5        0.37          216.7

Travellers Comp                  TRV-N              31.6        8.8        25.8       0.25           10.6

21St Century Fox                FOX-N              70.9       11.0        83.0      0.97            12.4

Seagate Tech                      STX-Q               16.3      11.1         9.1       1.33            76.2

Microsoft                             MSFT-Q            325.7      14.8         9.5      0.26           15.9

Raytheon                               RTNN               30.6       14.9        9.6       0.42           14.5

Hopefully the above tell shows there are many good companies to be found although to expect the dividend growth rate over 100% maybe asking for too much. Apple recently started paying a dividend and it does have $ 150 billion outside the US; the others are financials and they were all went down in 2008, but have come roaring back as the US economy improves.

With your investments, learn to narrow the field and you will find many good companies without having to  take on too much risk. The risk part will can be low and the reward high.

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