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The Stock Market Roller Coaster Ride

The past three months (to say nothing about this year in general) in the stock market have felt distinctly like a roller coaster ride. First climbing upward rapidly from July until early September, then abruptly sliding downward until late September, then bottoming out and angling upward again. Market participants are being pulled and jerked around in their restraints as they hang onto the handles.

The relative lack of volatility from mid-2016 through late 2018 and from early 2019 through February, 2020 felt like a pleasant horse-drawn carriage ride compared to the Covid era.

This has been even truer of many dividend stocks this year, as the risk of dividend cuts has induced yield-starved investors to vacillate wildly between fear and greed. It really is reminiscent of the speedy swings of emotion one feels on a roller coaster ride: anticipation and reward, excitement and terror, exhilaration and panic, laughing and shrieking.

So much happens in seemingly so little time.

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And then, when it’s over, you’re left thinking, “We waited an hour and a half for a 60 second ride?“

One benefit of being a dividend-focused investor is that stock market volatility, while anxiety-inducing, matters less — as long as one remains confident in the safety of one’s dividend income stream. We at High Yield Landlord try to put emotions aside and invest like landlords, paying less attention to asset prices and more to the operations of the business and the stability of cash inflows.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at five dividend growth stocks that remain good buys even as the market has enjoyed an October rebound.

1. Gilead Sciences (GILD)

Admittedly, biopharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences, which invented the drug that treats most HIV patients,