About this site

Dividend Growth Portfolio is an independent publication launched in February 2023 by Tim Fortier, the founder, and CIO of Drawbridge Strategies.

This site publishes an actively managed portfolio of high-quality dividend growth stocks selected from the Drawbridge Strategies Dynamic Dividend stock universe.

Not all dividend stocks are created equal.

Common dividend investing approaches often focus on yield at the exclusion of other factors, or dividend growth, which ignores stock valuations and market cycles.

At the core of the Dividend Growth Portfolio is a quantitative, multifactor database that ranks dividend-paying stocks on the basis of value, growth, quality, operating margins, and profit factors. To be included in the database, a company must have increased its dividend in 9 out of 10 years.

Any stock where the dividend has been cut is immediately eliminated from the database.

Lastly, we require the dividend to yield at least 2% as we believe that dividend investors want their stock returns to be somewhat rooted in dividends.

Quantitative Ranking Produces Superior Returns

We show the annualized return since 1999 of the dividend stocks in the Dynamic Dividend universe below. The dividend stocks with a composite ranking of 80 or greater have produced an annualized yield of 16.4%.

If you did nothing else than to ensure that your dividend stocks had a ranking of 80 or more and made very sure that you never held stocks with a ranking of less than 20, this would likely put you in the top 1.0% of all dividend investors.

Currently (February 2023) there are 96 stocks with a composite ranking of 80 or better. To narrow the search further, stocks selected for the Dividend Growth Portfolio are further screened using a combination of relative strength and tools developed by Chaikin Analytics.

The Chaikin Stock Rating takes twenty of the most important factors that affect a stock’s price movement, combines them into a proprietary algorithm, and distills them into one easy-to-read rating, on a color-coded scale from Very Bearish to Very Bullish.
The Chaikin Money Flow (the CMF Indicator) measures the accumulation (buying pressure) vs. distribution (selling pressure) of a stock over time. Stocks selected for the newsletter must show evidence of strong money flow persistency over the last 6-9 months.

Boost returns with small-cap stocks

Although the majority of stocks selected for the newsletter are classified as large caps, stocks ranked 80 or better with a market capitalization of less than $1B have produced an annualized return of 23.69%. The newsletter will include small caps that meet all the same criteria when possible.

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Meet the Team Behind the Dividend Growth Portfolio.

Tim Fortier - Editor

Tim brings over 30 years of experience working in the investment industry in multiple roles. He has been an advisor, the CIO of a family office, a hedge fund manager, a consultant, a product developer, and a publisher.

Tim became interested in systematic, rules-based investing in the mid-1990s and has been building strategies ever since. The approach that he has refined over the years involves risk management, and technical, fundamental, and quantitative analysis.

Tim is also the Chief Investment Strategist of Drawbridge Strategies, a firm he founded to develop and license systematic strategies and indexes.

Kurtis Hemmerling - Equity Factor Model Designer

Kurtis's interest in the stock market began at age 6 and he has passionately followed the markets ever since.

In 2011, Kurtis began building multi-factor strategies using institutional data and has never turned back. Hedge funds, family offices, and RIAs have used his innovative strategies.