Win Some, Lose Some

My Cousin Vinny is one of my favorite movies. Dale Launer's 1991 screenplay is brought to life by great performances from Joe Pesci, Marisa Tomei and Fred Gwynne. Tomei won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role. There is some wonderful dialog in the movie, including two passages at different times containing the title of this post. The first takes place between the title character Vinny Gambini (Pesci), who is pretending to be an experienced trial lawyer, and Judge Chamberlain Haller (Gwynn):

Judge: How long have you been practicing?
Vinny: Ooh, about six, uh... almost sixteen years.
Judge: Any murder cases?
Vinny: Quite a few. Yes.
Judge: What was the outcome?
Vinny: Um, you know. Win some, lose some.
Judge: This is not the forum to be cavalier.

Recent Buy: BBL

Nov 20, 2014: Bought 57 shares of BBL at $50.20 per share.

BHP Billiton is a diversified natural resources company and one of the world's largest producers of major commodities, including aluminum, coal, copper, iron ore, manganese, nickel, silver and uranium. BHP Billiton is a dual listed company comprising of BHP Billiton Limited (BHP) and BHP Billiton Plc (BBL). I'm buying shares in BBL, offered as American Depository Receipt (ADR) shares on the NYSE.

BBL is an existing holding, so I'm adding shares following substantial recent weakness in the stock price. I first initiated a position in June 2013, buying 43 shares at $58.39 per share and with an initial yield on cost (YoC) of 3.90%. With this buy, I'm averaging down to a per share price of $53.72. This time, initial YoC is a very respectable 4.94%.

Stock Analysis: Exxon Mobil Corporation

Exxon Mobil Corporation (XOM) is the world's largest publicly traded international oil and gas company. Founded in 1882 and based in Irving, Texas, XOM is engaged in oil and natural gas exploration and production, petroleum products refining and marketing, chemicals manufacture, and other-energy related businesses. Approximately 83% of Exxon's earnings come from its operations outside the United States.

XOM is a Dividend Champion with 32 consecutive years of dividend increases. The company pays dividends of 69¢ per share in the months of March, June, September, and December. At the current share price of $95.11, XOM yields a respectable 2.9%. The five-year dividend growth rate is 9.68%.

From November 2004 through November 2014, XOM outperformed the S&P 500 by 14%, reaching an all-time high $104.76 on 29 July 2014. Since then, the stock price has dropped about 10%.

Please read the rest of this stock analysis and the conclusion I reach at Seeking Alpha. 

Recent Buy: HP

Nov 11, 2014: Bought 29 shares of HP at $85.57 per share.

Helmerich & Payne (HP) is a contract drilling company headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The company is engaged in the drilling of oil and gas wells for exploration and production companies. It has a fleet of 328 land rigs in the U.S., 32 international land rigs and nine offshore platform rigs. Another 24 rigs is scheduled to be completed, including HP-designed and operated FlexRigs under long-term contracts with customers.

HP is a Dividend Champion with an impressive 42-yr streak of dividend increases. It pays quarterly dividends in March, June, September and December. Initial yield on cost is 3.21%.

Dividend Increases, October 16-31, 2014

I'm rather late in reporting on dividend increases for the last half of October. My source for dividend information, dividend.com, is experiencing a system issue that is not allowing premium users to filter dividend increases by date. So far, my requests to have the issue fixed have not been addressed, which is rather disappointing. I'll probably cancel my subscription.

Out of necessity, I've developed an alternative method to find and report on dividend increases. This took some time, but I'm happy that I won't be depending on a service that is rather unresponsive to customer's requests and suggestions. (Twice, I've suggested a feature that would be significantly improve functionality and would be trivial to add, yet it remains "under consideration").

Along with this change in process, I'll be changing the frequency and format of these posts. Rather than posting twice a month, I'll report on dividend increases weekly. Doing so will allow me to do the work over weekends, which will be more convenient anyway. I'm still working on the new format, so look out for my next post on dividend increases!

Monthly Review, October 2014

Every month, I review the past month's activities relating to DivGro, my portfolio of dividend growth stocks. At the same time, I update my blog's Performance page, which provides a central place for reviewing DivGro's status and performance relative to the markets and to prior months.

After selling two stocks in September due to dividend cuts, I had the luxury of having enough funds for three buys. I decided to add to my position in SDRL and I opened new positions in AVA and T. These buys increased DivGro's projected annual dividend income to $5,226. As a consequence, I've achieved one of my 2014 goals, namely to increase DivGro's projected annual dividend income to $4,800.

I'm close to achieving my other goal of reaching $3,600 in dividend income. At the end of October, dividend income totaled $3,163, so I'm only 12% away from achieving that goal.

10 Dividend Growth Stocks for November, 2014

One of my goals for 2014 is to balance DivGro's holdings across all 10 sectors in my watch list. Rather than targeting an equal number of holdings in each sector, I prefer to target a distribution proportional to the number of candidates in each sector of my watch list. The reason for not targeting an equal number of holdings in each sector is that there are many more dividend growth candidates in the Financials and Energy sectors, for example, than in the Materials and Telecommunication Services sectors.

I have a dynamic watch list, which means that the ideal sector distribution changes from month-to-month. I update my watch list every month when David Fish's CCC list is updated. The CCC list contains all U.S.-listed stocks that have raised their dividends for at least five consecutive years. David Fish distinguishes between Dividend Champions (25 or more years), Dividend Contenders (10-24 years), and Dividend Challengers (5-9 years).