How Do You Beat The Market So Often?

After reading The Future For Investors by Jeremy Siegel in 2005, I bought a little bit of Phillip Morris.  PM was the number 1 stock in his book over the study period from 1957 – 2003, about 46 years.  At the end of 2011, I did a review of our portfolio and realized how bad it sucked from 2000 to 2011.  We had stocks like Cisco, Microsoft, Home Depot, Starbucks, and a ton of the S&P 500 index in our portfolio.  You can see just how bad 2000 – 2011 was by looking at the graphic at the top of the page.

Wait a minute, what are these two stocks?  PM and MO (Altria) were doing very well.  I clicked on the “lots” under those stocks and saw a bunch of little purchases every 3 months.  Not only was I getting more shares through dividend reinvesting, PM and MO also had better returns than those other dogs I mentioned above.  The research that Jeremy Siegel had done still held up from 2003 – 2011.  It was then I decided to quit playing with stocks and pick real winners.  You can see that strategy is still holding up over here.  These winners are known as the Dividend Aristocrats.  They have a history of paying increasing dividends for the last 25 years.  You can see the list and read more here.

So here is what we most of our portfolio (had some mistakes mixed in) has been made up of since 2012 when we moved into our current broker.

Altria – MO

Phillip Morris – PM

ConocoPhillips – COP

Merck – MRK

That’s it.  We only have 4 highly quality stocks.  PM and MO are not on the Dividend Aristocrats list due to PM spinning off MO in 2008.  ConocoPhillips (COP) is not on there either and we are losing on that one.  Merck (MRK) was on Jeremy Siegel’s original list, but is not a Dividend Aristocrat any more due to not increasing their dividend in the mid 2000’s.  We sold MRK off on 7/18/2016.  We only have .91 shares of MRK now.

Thanks for stopping by and I hope you found the post helpful.

This entry was posted in Investing, Stocks. Bookmark the permalink.

6 Responses to How Do You Beat The Market So Often?

  1. Alex Vinson says:

    Wow. Those are powerful numbers. Great post!

  2. Pingback: What If You Don’t Like to Budget? | Financial Independence Warrior

  3. Jason S says:

    Nice!!

Leave a Reply to Jason S Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.