The Dividend Achievers are companies that have increased their annual regular cash dividend payments for at least each of the last ten consecutive calendar or fiscal years. A trademarked property of the Nasdaq, the Dividend Achievers are tracked under license by several exchange-traded funds, including Invesco's PFM.
In this article, I present the highest quality Dividend Achievers based on Quality Snapshots, an eloquent system developed by David Van Knapp for assessing the quality of dividend growth stocks. The system employs five quality indicators from independent sources and assigns 0-5 quality points to each quality indicator for a maximum score of 25 quality points.
I decided to use a variation of the original Quality Snapshots system to find the highest quality DG stocks among the Dividend Achievers. The variation uses Value Line's Price Stability instead of Value Line's Safety Rank.