10 Dividend Growth Stocks For April 2017

I love David Fish's CCC list of dividend growth stocks trading on U.S. exchanges. Updated every month, the CCC list contains more than 800 stocks with at least five consecutive years of higher dividend payments. The accompanying spreadsheet provides key statistics of the CCC stocks and is a wonderful source for dividend growth investors.

In my monthly 10 Dividend Growth Stock series, I identify 10 CCC stocks worthy of further analysis. To create the list, I trim the CCC list using various screens. I rank the trimmed list and assign a 7-star rating to each stock. Stocks rated 5-stars or better are worthy of further analysis.

This month's screens favor dividend growth stocks with strong earnings and earnings growth. Here's the set of screens I used:

1. Trailing 12-month Return on Equity ≥ 10
2. 1.25 ≤ Dividend Yield ≤ 8.25
3. (2 × Dividend Yield) + (3-year Dividend Growth Rate ÷ 2) ≥ 8 
4. Average of Past 5-year and Next 5-year Earnings Growth Rates  ≥ 6 
5. Market Capitalization ≥ $1 Billion

These screens trim the CCC list from 816 to 193 stocks. Of course, ranking 193 would be quite tedious, so I did a quick preliminary ranking using data from the CCC spreadsheed and selected the top 50 stocks to do the more comprehensive ranking where I use additional sources like Morningstar, S&P Capital IQ, and F.A.S.T. Graphs.

To see the top 10 ranked stocks for April, please read this article at Seeking Alpha.

Includes: ACN, CVS, GD, HRL, MGA, MMM, NKE, PII, QCOM, TGT, TJX, TROW, VFC

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