Motley Fool Money - Introducing the Dividend Seven

Episode Date: December 8, 2024

Motley Fool Senior Analysts Matt Argersinger and Anthony Schiavone join Mary Long to discuss:  - How a company enters into the Dividend Seven. - If Home Depot can still be a growth stock. - The metrics that dividend investors need to understand.  - Companies that have raised their dividend for decades. Companies discussed: PLD, JPM, PEP, HD, ABBV, MCD, BLK Host: Mary Long Guests: Matt Argersinger, Anthony Schiavone Producer: Ricky Mulvey  Engineers: Desireé Jones, Rick Engdahl Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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So if you think about that, how many recessions, business cycles, wars, calamities happen over a 50-year period, and yet here's a company that's raised this dividend every year. I'm Ricky Mulvey and that's Motley Fool senior analyst Matt Argusinger. Look, dominant tech companies have their own category, the magnificent seven. You probably already know it. But on today's show, Matt Argusinger and Anthony Chavone unveil their own group of seven, the dividend seven, powerful companies, that pay investors income.

They joined Mary Long to discuss a big retailer that's insulated itself from Amazon, a dominant financial company with $10.7 trillion in assets under management, and what it takes for a company to enter the Dividend Seven. And most listeners are likely already familiar with the magnificent seven, this basket of tech stocks that have dominated the market recently.

But you two have come up with a different set of stocks. You've called it the Dividend Seven. exactly is the criteria for making it into this group? And how did you land on these requirements? There are seven of them, I'm correct, right? That's right. Well, thank you, Mary. Yeah, this was a fun exercise for us. You know, we've seen, of course, the Magnificent Seven be this, I don't know, this major force in the market that investors have just been, you know, magnetized to. And we thought, well, you know, we talk a lot about dividends. We do a dividend show here, you know, at the Motley Fool every other week. And we thought, you know, a fun topic would be, could we do our own version of the

Magnificent Seven and, you know, layer in dividends and come up with this Dividend 7 or Div 7 group? And so the Magnificent 7 was our inspiration. And so I think that's kind of, and it kind of feeds into the seven criteria we use to select the stocks. So we'll start with the first one, which is just dominance. I mean, if we think about the Magnificent 7, these are some of the most dominant companies, if not the most dominant companies in the world. about Amazon, Nvidia, meta, Tesla. And so we thought, okay, let's start with that. Let's, let's only pick companies that we think are dominant. They're, of course, sizable. They have tremendous scale. And they have leadership in the markets that they serve. And in most cases,

they're the leading number one market share company within that space. But then, of course, since this is a dividend seven and not just a Magnificent seven, we had to have some dividend criteria. So the next three are dividend criteria. We have dividend growth. We wanted each of the companies to have grown their dividend by at least 100% over the last 10 years, so a doubling of their dividend. We wanted companies that were committed to a dividend. This is our third criteria, which is, you know, they had a sizable payout ratio. They were prioritizing the dividend in the way they allocate capital for the business. And then our fourth criteria was dividend yield. And this is something, of course, investors are always looking for when they're looking for dividend

stocks, what is the stock yield? Well, we wanted yields that were at least 50% higher than the current yield on the S&P 500, which right now is around 1.2%. It's near a historic low. So we were kind of looking for a dividend yield of about 2% minimum for each of the companies that we were looking for. And then the fifth criteria was just we just wanted growth. In other words, we wanted, we called it a business growth, but we wanted confidence that this wasn't a business that was stagnating. This was a business where revenue, earnings, cash flow, we could see it move all that moving higher in the future. In other words, the business has tailwinds to it. The sixth criteria is financial strength. So strong balance sheet, you know, cash flows that are

robust, that can withstand business cycles, a company that's built to withstand unexpected circumstances or macroeconomic, you know, issues, things like that. And the seventh and final criteria, I know I've drawn on her a bit was we're looking for special. Is there something with this company or the set of companies that make them unique, make them stand out, kind of make them visible in the minds of investors, consumers, you know, beyond just them being a corporation in the U.S. So those were the seven criteria we used. So we got seven companies here today. We're going to take a moment to kind of spotlight each of them briefly.

But before we get there, thinking about this group as a whole, there's a push-pull in dividend investing between yield and growth a lot of times. Both are factors that you considered, obviously, when pulling this particular group together, as a whole, do you find that it favors growth, over yield, or vice versa? What's kind of the thinking behind that here? Yes, that's a, that's a, I wouldn't call it dilemma, but it is something dividend investors in particular struggle with is, do I buy companies that have big yields, you know, yields of three, four, five percent, or do I do buy companies that are paying

a dividend but might have a smaller yield but are capable of growing their earnings and therefore their dividend at a faster rate over time? The good news is with the seven companies we picked, it actually, actually is quite balanced. The average dividend yield for the group is about two and a half percent. Now, some investors might consider that low, but remember, the yield on the S&P 500 right now is 1.2 percent. It's a historic low. So this group, on average, is double that yield. So I think that's important. But at the same time, remember, because we were looking at companies that were growing their dividend or doubling their dividend over the last 10 years, you're still getting,

you're still getting a lot of growth here as well. So I love the list because I think each of the companies, again, on average, has a pretty nice balance between yield and growth. Okay, so we're going to spotlight each of these companies. There's quite a varied group. We've got a REIT, a bank, a consumer goods company, a retailer, a fast food chain, drug developer, an asset manager. First up is that REIT that I mentioned. This one likely will not be a shocker to anybody who follows the dividend show or listens to a lot of full content pretty closely. We got Prologis. It's the world's largest REIT and a global leader in logistics. Real Estate in particular. It's got more than $200 billion in assets under management. It's

grown its dividend and returned over 190% in the last 10 years. Guys, the CEO and the kind of co-founder, co-founder of Prologis's predecessor company, he's described this Prologis as, quote, basically the toll taker in the world of global commerce. What's he mean by that? Right. We're big fans of Hamid Mogadam, who's the CEO of and co-founder of Prologis. Well, if you think about Prologis, its size and scale. We're talking 5,600 buildings spanning 1.2 billion square feet on four continents. It really is kind of the real estate backbone of global commerce. I mean, so much transaction, so much inventory flows through Pelagis's facilities every year. The company estimates that 2.5% of global GDP, which I don't know the number off the top of my

head, but that's a big, big number. Two and a half percent of global GDP flows through Pelagis's real estate every year. And if you think about the importance of supply chain management, of inventory management among companies today, especially companies who are doing business in kind of omni-channel ways. You know, they have, but they might have a brick and mortar's presence. They might have, of course, these days have an e-commerce presence. And so the need to have physical infrastructure to support that is more critical than ever. And especially since, if you think about since COVID, the effect that the pandemic had on supply chains and the need to for companies to have more control over their inventory and their sourcing was so huge.

And so that's why I just think there's so many tailwinds to Prologis's business. And of course, it's been a wonderful dividend company. And, you know, one of the best reeds, if not the best reet that Ant and I come across all the time. And so we had to have Prologis in our Div 7, at least our inaugural Div 7. Matt, you mentioned these tailwinds. And I buy everything that you're saying, but you'll look at the stock price of Prologis. and it's down about 14% year-to-date. Why do you think that is?

Ant, do you want to take a crack at that? Yeah, so if we go back to, let's go back to 2017 for a minute. The Fed was raising interest rates. And on a conference call, an analyst asked Hamid Magadam, what's the impact of higher interest rates on your business? And Hamid responded, the short-term impacts of higher interest rates on our business will be a 10 to 15% drop in our stock price.

And then he continued saying, interest rates are going up because the economy is hot. It will translate into rents and growth and activity. And in six months, the impact of higher interest rates on our business will be exactly zero. So if we fast forward to today, the 10-year treasury rate was around 3.6% in September. And now it's around 4.2% today. And over that time period, you've seen a roughly 14, 15% decline in prologer's share price. So it's essentially exactly what Hamid Maghadon said seven years ago. So as a Prologis shareholder myself, I'm not too worried about Prologis'

recent share price underperformance. You're still collecting a 3.5% dividend yield and the payout is growing at a double-digit rate. So as a shareholder, I'm fine with that. So it sounds like if you were to add smart management as an eighth checkbox for the dividend seven, Prologis would check that box as well, for sure. Good point. One more question here before we move on. to the next in this group. Funds from Operations or FFO is a key number for REIT investors. For folks

listening who are less familiar with REITs are kind of newer to this space, what does FFO measure exactly? And how does Prologa stack up on that front? Right. Reets are a little bit of a different kind of entity in the stock market. I mean, they're publicly traded just like stocks, but they are, they have some special rules, which we don't have time to really get into. But the best way to measure REITs, the cash flow of REITs is not through earnings. It's really through the, this term funds from operations, FFO. And what FFO does, it does a number of things, but the two big things it does is it excludes depreciation, which you think about the biggest cost for a real estate company is depreciation.

Real estate gets depreciated over time, no matter what it is. Residential real estate, commercial real estate, it depreciates over time. And that's a non-cash expense that FFO adds back to earnings. And then also gains losses on property sales. So REITs, if you are buying and selling properties all the time, and it'd be kind of strange if you're trying to measure the operational prowess of a company to include those because, you know, that could be volatile. A company might decide to sell a bunch of properties one quarter, buy a bunch of properties

in another quarter. And so smoothing that out and taking that away gets you a better kind of idea of what the operational cash flow of the business is. And that's what FFO is. Okay, up next in our Div 7 basket, we've got JPMorgan. This is the world's largest bank by MarketCap, probably a very familiar name to most everybody. It is a massive company. Steady dividend growth, a commitment to that dividend, dividend yield of more than two percent, which is higher than a lot of other banks, over 200 percent

dividend growth in the past 10 years. There's a lot of good here. And again, it seems, even if you strip the numbers away, the name J.P. Morgan has such power. Yeah, Robitas, right. But it's like, I hear all this stuff and I'm like, okay, what is the bear case against? J.P. Morgan, is it ever away? Like, why might someone not want to invest in this company? Yeah, this was a natural fit for our div 7. And you mentioned, Mary, the 200% dividend growth last 10 years. That was a big draw for why we wanted to have it in the list. But yeah, I mean, if I had to take the bare case for JP Morgan, I would say, you know, banks have benefited finally from the higher interest rates that we've gotten over the last few years. That's been done wonders for their net interest margin. Banks have still been able to

pay really ultra low rates to depositors on checking accounts and savings accounts, but then turn around and lend those borrowings or that capital at much higher rates for the first time in really 15 years. And so that's been a huge benefit to banks. And so if we do get lower interest rates and the Fed has already sort of embarked on an easing cycle, that could hurt the net interest margin for a bank like JP Morgan. I mean, you also, you're talking about a bank. And for some reason in the US, we just have thousands of banks. Whereas you go to most other countries, including Canada, just up north, they have like five banks. We somehow have thousands of banks in the U.S. And so there's always competition. I think J.P. Morgan, of course, is the most dominant. But,

you know, even J.P. Morgan has competition from Bank of America, Citibank, Golden Sachs and investment banks as well. And then there also has been a very strict regulatory environment for banks since the global financial crisis. That's really limited. capital allocation flexibility of banks. So even JPMorgan every year has to kind of ask permission from federal regulators to raise its dividend to do buybacks and things like that. And so that's been a bit of a, you know, a bit of a cloud. And who knows? I mean, this is not my area of expertise, but we do have, you know, you've seen the rise of Bitcoin. Now over $100,000 of coin, I can't believe it. But the whole rise of decentralized finance kind of coming out of the whole crypto market,

crypto ecosphere. And also at the same time, you've had this rise of private credit, non-bank lenders. That's competition for JP Morgan. And so, you know, that would be my bare case. But gosh, talk about a dominant company and one that we had to have in the DIF 7. Such a dominant company that we're going to just do a quick spotlight there and now move on to the next because we've got a number of companies to still get through today. The third company in the DIV 7 is another one that really needs no introduction, PepsiCo. This is a number of again, unsurprisingly, yet another steady dividend grower. One of the things that stuck out to me, it's got a payout ratio of 70% pretty high. For the listener who, again, might be newer to

dividend investing, what does that number mean exactly? Yeah, so the dividend payout ratio is one of the most important metrics for dividend investors. A couple of different ways to calculate it, but one simple approach is to take the annualized quarterly dividend rate and divide it by the expected earnings per share for that year. So let's just say Pepsi's expected. I'm making this up, but let's say they payout 70 cents in dividends this year. It managed to be especially to generate $1 in earnings. The payout ratio would be 70%. So in other words, earnings would have the fall more than 30% for the dividend payout to become unsustainable. And for a company like Pepsi that has very stable recurring revenue like model, they can afford to have a relatively high payout ratio at around

70% because they have a strong balance sheet. They have predictable revenue. You know earnings growth is going to occur pretty much every year. And they also have a strong track record of dividend in growth for another sector like oil and gas stocks, for example, they tend to be a lot more cyclical. So you'd want to have a payout ratio that's lower than 70%, preferably less than 50%, because their earnings are more volatile. So generally speaking, a payout ratio less than 50% tends to be pretty safe, but companies like Pepsi could certainly pay out more than that. And a high payout ratio for a quality company like Pepsi can even signal higher earnings growth in the future. There's certainly a lot of quality and steadiness that you get,

when you invest in Pepsi. But if you zoom out and look at total returns over the past 10 years, Pepsi does beat out Coke, but it falls pretty far below the S&P 500. What's the case for investing in Pepsi specifically rather than putting your money in the S&P or an index fund? Yeah. So what's interesting is over the last 10 years, Pepsi was roughly tracking the market's return all the way until early 2023. And that's what we had the mini banking crisis, if you want to call it that. And then you had the explosion in AI, that's when the market really started to outperform Pepsi. So Pepsi's not necessarily doing anything wrong. The market is just assigning a lower earnings multiple to Pepsi and a higher earnings multiple to the S&P 500. So I think as an investor,

the investing case for Pepsi is, it's 3.4% dividend yield is roughly almost three times larger than the S&P's yield of 1.2% like Matt mentioned earlier. And then it trades at a discount evaluation compared to the market. And then third, Pepsi's provides a little of a diversification away from a tech-heavy S-FP 500. So, you know, there's something wrong with investing in a low-cost S&P 500 index fund. But if there's an argument for investing in Pepsi, I think that's the one to make. Okay. The fourth stock that we're looking at today is Home Depot. Just in preparation for this episode, guys, I checked. And Home Depot is at an all-time high. So maybe this goes back to our earlier conversation about growth and yield, but this stock has been on a tear recently. It's pretty

fair to say. Again, I thought this was supposed to be a dividend play. Is Home Depot one of those ones that is a growth stock too? I think so, Mary. It's definitely got both attributes. It's a company that has prioritized the dividend, pays, steadily grown that dividend, and the dividend has always taken up a pretty good chunk of Home Depot's earnings. So there's been a decent payout ratio. But no doubt, Home Depot stock has been a, on absolute tear recently. And it's actually kind of surprising to me because if you look at the business and how the business has performed, it's been a rough couple of years for Home Depot. Really, almost since the day the Fed started raising rates back in, gosh, when that was that early 2022, you know, Home Depot's business has

struggled. And that's because the housing market, which of course is in the short term so correlated with rates, with mortgage rates, has been really stagnant. And so, So with less home housing turnover, Home Depot's business has struggled. Yet, like you mentioned, Home Depot is almost at an all-time high. And I'm wondering if it's because the market is anticipating with the Fed lowering rates, is there going to be a stronger housing market in 2025 and beyond? They're going to see a big pickup in home renovations. Maybe that's the reason.

So the market's already looking ahead of here. But it certainly seems a little bit stretched in my view. Home Depot has grown its dividend over 280 percent in the past 10,000. years, that is, I think that's the highest out of all of these companies that we're looking at today. I think you're right. Has management's philosophy about returning cash to shareholders, has that changed at all in that time or perhaps prior to this 10-year horizon? Or has it remained pretty consistent and they're just really good at what they do? That approach of the dividend has remained consistent. Certainly with CEO Ted Decker, it's probably even gone more into the philosophy of what

the company does. But yeah, it's always, the dividend has always been a priority. And I think the steadiness of Home Depot's business, the fact that the company generates so much cash flow has such a stable revenue picture and it's so well diversified across in terms of products. And it's got so I think with a lot of retailers don't have, which is sort of that protection against e-commerce. By the way, it is one of the biggest e-commerce companies in the country, but it has that sort of anti, not anti, but protection from Amazon and other sort of mass online market places because of just the nature of the products it sells. And I think that's insulated it from a lot of competition as well.

So it always has good visibility in its cash flow and therefore has always made the dividend a priority. Quick sidebar here. With the exception of prologis, almost all of the companies that we've talked about today and more that we'll continue to talk about in just a moment are really big brands. Like with Home Depot, everybody knows Home Depot. You see the orange apron. You associate that with Home Depot. PepsiCo. I would bet that most people have Pepsi products in their kitchen.

J.P. Morgan, that's a name that a lot of people know. Do you make anything of that? Is there some kind of relationship between really strong brand building and dividend payers, or is it just a product of, hey, these companies have been around for a really long time and they represent quality? Yeah, all of the above, like it's like that, Mary, and I love answer on this as well, but I think this just goes into, you see it throughout history. What, you know, what, where do the most dominant companies, how do the most dominant companies become so dominant? And it's because they have such a a brand, presence, and imprint on the minds of consumers, investors, other businesses, right? Home Depot, as one example, serves, and Prologist in particular, serves mostly businesses,

not necessarily consumers. And so I think that goes hand in hand with having a major company. And it's obvious that was part of, I think, the reason, at least maybe indirectly, as to why these companies are showing up in the Div 7, because they're so recognizable, at least most of them, and that they made them natural fits. I would just echo what I said earlier about financial strength is a lot of these businesses are so big because they've been able to survive for so long. I mean, most of these companies are talking about today have increased their dividend for more than 25 consecutive years, 40 consecutive years, even 50 consecutive years. So you have to have a strong balance sheet to be able to survive that long to get that known brand that many of these companies have. So yeah, financial strength, very important. Up next on the list, I'll admit I was a little surprised to see just because I don't typically think of drug developers as falling into this category. category. The stock that I'm talking about is Abdi. Again, it's a drug developer. 52 consecutive years of dividend raises. Like Pepsi, actually, this is a dividend king. What's that distinction mean, guys? Right. Well, a dividend king is a real rare distinction that a company can get if it

raises its dividend for 50 or more consecutive years. So if you think about that, how many recessions, business cycles, wars, calamities happen over a 50-year period? And yet, here Here's a company that's raised this dividend every year, even through the global financial crisis or even through the COVID that we recently had. Every year, this company has raised this dividend. And Avi, which is, by the way, a spin out from Abbott Labs, which maybe some investors might be more familiar with, but it was able to maintain its dividend history when it was part of Abbott Labs going back 52 years.

When you two talked about this company on The Dividend Show, one of the things that you pointed out is that it has a KAPX ratio of less than 5%. I can hear a lot of people, and I caught myself initially doing it too, thinking, wait, hold on, this is a drug development company. They've got to spend a ton of money on research and development. But important to note, there's a distinction between CAPEX and research and development. What is that difference? And why does that distinction between the two matter? Right.

Well, so R&D is an operating expense and it gets expensed, you know, right as it's being expensed as you're paying to conduct tests. You're paying lab technicians to do certain things. And that, so that money is spent. It's, it's an operating expense. It goes out the door. With CAPX, think about things that are long-term investments in the business, building facilities, labs, acquiring other businesses, intellectual property, those kinds of things. Those are long-term investments that get expensed over time. But the nice thing is, even though those are still, that's still cash going out the window, it doesn't affect your expenses in terms of your operational income. And so the fact that AbVy has such a low KAPX ratio means that it doesn't have to spend a lot on big capital expenses.

And therefore, its free cash flow is generally a lot higher, which I think is important for a company like Abbey, which is in the drug development business. We know how volatile that can be. You can have successes with certain drugs or failures with certain drugs. It can be a little bit up and down. But as long as AbV is generating cash flow, the business can be somewhat more stable. Okay, moving on to the next stock in this group, we've got McDonald's. Kind of like Home Depot. This is another company with a healthy focus on dividend that also seems to just keep growing.

McDonald's, again, has grown its dividend for 48 years in a row, so almost at that dividend king status, but not quite yet. It has a payout ratio of about 60%, a yield of over 2%. And again, on the growth point, they're speeding up new store openings, are growing their digital channels. they've also got a franchise model. And how does that set up this franchise model come into play for a company like McDonald's? Yeah, I mean, McDonald's has more than 41,000 stores across 100 countries.

They've served hundreds of billions of burgers over the years, hundreds of billions of burgers. But somehow, like you said, they still find a way to continue to open up new stores and continue to grow. And to your point, it's that franchise model. McDonald's essentially purchases the land. they purchase the building for a new store, and then they collect rent and royalties from the franchise. So by franchising most of their stores, McDonald's can expand more quickly because the capital investment isn't as large compared to opening a company-owned store, whether they're paying for everything and their cap-backs will be larger. So I think that franchise model is one

reason why, after all these years, McDonald's is still growing and opening more stores than they ever have before. As we kind of continue to think about this, this growth piece of the equation. GLP1 drugs have been a big story throughout the year. Surely they'll continue to be in 25 and beyond. How do you think that might affect McDonald's growth story? And I mean, also Pepsi, I would say, kind of falls into this category of a company

that could potentially be affected by, if they haven't already been affected by the rise of weight loss drugs. Does that play at all into kind of how you think about McDonald's moving forward? Yeah, I mean, it definitely does. And that is a million-dollar question. like how do these drugs affect a lot of these food-related companies? And to be honest, I don't know. I don't think anybody really knows the full impact that these drugs will have on eating habits over the long term. I have a suspicion that the drugs might not impact the food companies too much, maybe on the margin,

but they won't have a devastating impact. And let's just say, like, hypothetically speaking, let's say they do have a massive impact on eating habits. What are the second order effects on that? like what happens to Pepsi's pricing power? What happens to its weaker competition? So those are all questions that need to be answered too. So there's a lot of unanswered questions right now. But one thing is true. If you look at McDonald's stock price right now, it's near an all-time high.

So the market doesn't seem to be too worried about GOP1 drugs. But yeah, I mean, we'll see. I really don't know. But it will be interesting to see how this unfolds. If I could just add also, we took a look at Hershey and considered putting Hershey on our Div 7 list as well, because Hershey is a company that has such a great history, dividend track record, etc. But we thought, well, McDonald's Pepsi and Hershey, we're being a little bit contrarian when it comes to the whole GLP1 story. Actually, Hershey as well.

But for now, McDonald's Pepsi. And, you know, again, you're trying to diversify a lot. And you've got a bunch of different companies within this group that play in a lot of different sectors and industry. Last but not least, rounding us out, we've got the world's largest asset manager. that is BlackRock. In The Dividend Show, guys, you called out the I Shares franchise in particular as being what makes Black Rock kind of tick this, this seventh qualifier to putting it in the Dividend seven. It's special sauce. What makes it unique? What is it about the I Shares brand that stands out so much? Right. I mean, BlackRock has always been a massive asset manager in the world. But the

I Shares brand is really what kind of set the rocket fuel for this business more than a decade ago. So, again, this is one of those companies where it's going to be more familiar to investors and businesses and pension funds than it is to maybe your average consumer. But BlackRock has $10.7 trillion in assets under management, which is just a massive number. I mean, the GDP of the United States, I think, is around $20 trillion, maybe a little more than that now. So just to put that in context, I mean, it's a massive, massive number. And the I shares ETF brand is probably by far the most recognizable. ETF, I'd say, brand in the marketplace. And it's where just so many assets go.

So many money managers around the world, funds, pension funds, as I mentioned, know the I shares brand are comfortable with the I shares brand and tend to use the I shares for various strategies or for their fund management. And so it's just got these tentacles everywhere. And if you look at, for example, BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF that they just launched recently, It's already become, I think, the largest or the second largest Bitcoin ETF. And that owes itself to the BlackRock brand, the I shares brand. It's all of a sudden investors saying, well, if I want to invest in Bitcoin, how do I want to do it?

Well, I'm going to use I shares because I know they're cheap. I know they're big. I know they're backed by BlackRock, which is one of the largest and most stable asset managers in the world. And that just kind of feeds on itself. And so BlackRock seems to me like this monster dominant of a company that is just going to get more and more dominant as time goes on. To close us out today, guys, we used the MAG7 as a jumping off point for this conversation. That's kind of what inspired you to pull together this dividend 7 group in the first place. All of those are growthy tech companies.

So when we think about valuation, some investors might use a peg ratio to value some of those companies. That's maybe not the case with some of these that we've talked about today. How do you two value the companies that we've talked about today? Any stick out as a little too pricey for your taste or on the flip side as being priced pretty attractively right now? I tend to just use a simple price earnings multiple as a starting point. For a lot of these companies, they're very well-established companies. They tend to have very predictable earnings, predictable revenue growth, predictable dividend growth as well. And then it's not, I wouldn't say it's necessarily a valuation metric, but yield is definitely important and it's something that Matt and I look at.

Like we said, we want to look at companies that at least have a dividend yield 50% higher than the market. Preferably even higher than that is even better because as we know of the long on, I think the dividends account for, what does it, Matt, roughly 50% of the market's return over the last 100 or so years. So dividend yield is also very important. Yeah, for me, Mary, I would say, you know, we mentioned prologis and, you know, and had that great kind of look back at what the CEO said a bunch of years ago. And that to me seems to stand out as one particularly compelling opportunity. On the flip side, I'd say, you know, we did talk about Home Depot. You know, That one feels a little stretch to me, just given where we, you know, where we are, where

its evaluation is and the uncertainties around interest rates in the housing market. But I would say in general, if you look at these seven companies, these seven companies, I would not call any of them cheap. In other words, because they're so dominant, because they are so recognizable and so they're included in so many, of course, investor portfolios and institutional portfolios, just like the MAG7 and however that group changes over time, I expect this. div 7 is generally going to include companies that are pretty pricey, but deserve so because they deserve a premium because they are premium businesses. Matt, and always a pleasure talking to the

both of you. Thanks so much for the time today for walking us through the first iteration, hopefully the first of many different iterations of the dividend 7. Thanks so much, guys. Thank you, very. Thanks. As always, people on the program may have interests in the stocks they talk about, and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motleyful editorial standards and are not approved by advertisers, the Motleyful only picks products that it would personally recommend to friends like you. I'm Riky Malvey. Thanks for listening. We'll be back

tomorrow.