Reinvesting Dividends: Hedge Funds Love These High Yield Stocks

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Referenced Stocks:AYR;STX;NYX;SBGI;TSU;UVV

(Written by Rebecca Lipman. List compiled by Eben Esterhuizen, CFA)

When investors purchase shares of dividend-yielding stocks, they are given the opportunity to receive the dividends or have them reinvested. Simply purchase a stock and you can watch your portfolio slowly accumulate even more shares over the course of several years.

Reinvesting dividends is often considered a good move as it capitalizes off compounded interest, but as with most investment strategies, there’s a potential downside to consider.

The Wisdom and Folly of Reinvesting Dividends

If a stock does well, reinvesting dividends can lead to some handsome profits. Consider the investor benefits from the gain off the initial purchase price, plus the dividend value, and then add the value of additional dividend-purchased shares and their dividend revenue. There’s also the potential for dividend reinvestment appreciation (change in value of the dividends reinvested back into the stock).

If a stock does poorly, the value of dividends reinvested could presumably compensate for overall share value losses. But if the stock value drops too much, the dividend rewards may be insufficient.

To add salt to the wound, even the unlucky investors are obliged to pay taxes on dividend income. This can also be a trial for investors with profitable stock holdings, as that money is presumably held up in re-investing equities and tax money must therefore be taken from personal funds.

In all, dividend reinvesting can be truly profitable if the company maintains a good and consistent performance. Therefore it’s important when choosing a dividend reinvesting stock to consider its sustainability.

Investing Ideas: Choosing the right Dividend Stocks

Wondering which high yield dividend stocks have caught Wall Street’s attention?

To create this list, we started with a universe of about 180 high yield dividend stocks. To control the quality of the list, we only focused on the names that have dividend payout ratios below 50% (i.e. less than 50% of their profits are paid out as dividends)

Next, we collected data on institutional money flows, and identified the names that have seen a significant rise in big money buying during the current quarter.

Institutional investors seem to think these high dividend yields are sustainable–do you?

Use this list as a starting point for your own analysis.

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1. Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc. (SBGI): Provides certain programming, operating, or sales services to television stations in the United States. Dividend yield at 5.17%, with a payout ratio at 46.76%. Net institutional purchases in the current quarter at 2.1M shares, which represents about 4.13% of the company's float of 50.81M shares.

2. TIM Participacoes S.A. (TSU): Provides mobile telecommunications services through global system mobile (GSM) technology to business and individual customers in Brazil. Dividend yield at 5.12%, with a payout ratio at 17.96%. Net institutional purchases in the current quarter at 13.3M shares, which represents about 11.85% of the company's float of 112.22M shares.

3. NYSE Euronext, Inc. (NYX): Operates securities exchanges. Dividend yield at 4.49%, with a payout ratio at 48.77%. Net institutional purchases in the current quarter at 14.0M shares, which represents about 5.36% of the company's float of 261.37M shares.

4. Universal Corp. (UVV): Operates as a leaf tobacco merchant and processor worldwide. Dividend yield at 4.48%, with a payout ratio at 33.93%. Net institutional purchases in the current quarter at 1.5M shares, which represents about 6.57% of the company's float of 22.82M shares.

5. Aircastle LTD (AYR): Engages in the acquisition, lease, and sale of high-utility commercial jet aircraft to passenger and cargo airlines worldwide. Dividend yield at 4.31%, with a payout ratio at 35.40%. Net institutional purchases in the current quarter at 2.0M shares, which represents about 3.57% of the company's float of 56.02M shares.

6. Seagate Technology PLC (STX): Designs, manufactures, markets, and sells hard disk drives for the enterprise, client compute, and client non-compute market applications in the United States and internationally. Dividend yield at 4.20%, with a payout ratio at 30.28%. Net institutional purchases in the current quarter at 26.7M shares, which represents about 6.82% of the company's float of 391.47M shares.