The hunt for yield just got a little easier.
Five stocks with bountiful dividends are far outpacing the S&P 500 for 2019, showing that not only can they pay out high dividends, they can also produce healthy gains for investors.
While the S&P is up a little over 9 percent for the year, shares of Coty, Philip Morris, Western Digital, Exxon Mobil and General Motors — all of which have dividends yielding at least 4 percent — are up by double digits.
What’s more: Market watchers tell CNBC that two of these five stocks have even more runway ahead.
Mark Tepper, president and CEO of Strategic Wealth Partners, likes the prospects for GM, noting that dividend stocks have generally outperformed nondividend stocks every year since 1927, and with almost 40 percent less volatility.
“When I look at all these companies and try to determine which has the most potential upside, you really need to look for positive catalysts, and, in my opinion, GM has more positive catalysts than the rest of the group,” he said Thursday on “Trading Nation.” “GM has a huge opportunity right now to get their financials moving in the right direction by making good, strategic decisions, which, for them, is really a ‘less is more’ approach: fewer vehicles, fewer countries.”
Tepper noted a few of GM’s strategic moves, including the company’s move away from less profitable cars and toward more popular trucks and SUVs, both of which have seen higher sales in the U.S. and China in recent years.
“Even though, overall, auto demand is slowing, GM should be able to grow both the top and the bottom lines by focusing on raising prices and also their higher-margin vehicles in two locations: North America and China,” he said.
Instinet Chief Market Technician Frank Cappelleri sees more upside for Western Digital, a computer hardware and data storage play that has seen some vicious trading over the years.
“Looking back at WDC, it dropped about 70 percent from its high last March, and now, even after the bounce, it’s still 120 percent away from those levels. So the question is, of course, can this bounce continue? And I think the answer is yes,” Cappelleri said on “Trading Nation.”
The technical expert explained that WDC’s 2014 and 2016 collapses were so drastic that they produced monthly oversold readings in the relative strength index, a momentum indicator.
“That’s pretty rare,” he said Thursday. “A lot of bad things have to happen over a long period of time for that to occur. [The] stock was able to regroup near its breakout point from the previous years in the mid-$30s, and then we saw a substantial rally from there. So I think, now, the stock’s still coming back, but, again, after the 70 percent decline, [the] monthly RSI again became oversold. So, because of that, I think you could be in the early stages of WDC coming back. It may take a while, but I see further upside ahead.”
