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- David Kostin - the chief US equity strategist at Goldman Sachs - says high-dividend stocks look very promising in an environment where interest rates likely to fall further.
- Kostin has identified a subset of the high-dividend group including firms that have the potential to raise payouts even further.
- He says those stocks are unusually cheap compared to the rest of the market because investors are too pessimistic about overall dividend growth.
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It's hard to find inexpensive stocks in today's market, and yield might be even harder to find. But David Kostin - the chief US equity strategist at Goldman Sachs - says one group of stocks might fit both criteria.
He says major opportunities are available in a precise group of high-dividend stocks - a subset of the market that could catch investor attention with interest rates expected to head lower in the months ahead. After all, when bonds are offering lower interest payments, stocks that can offer regular cash distributions become more appealing.
"With the 10-year Treasury yield at just 1.5% and the Fed likely to cut two more times this year, investors should look for opportunities in dividend stocks," Kostin writes.
Digging in further, Kostin names companies that not only already offer almost double the dividend payouts of the broader S&P 500, but also have the potential to raise their dividends further than their peers.
This chart suggests the stocks have a lot of room to appreciate as well, as their price-to-earnings ratios are unusually low.
Compustat and Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research
The stocks were evaluated based on Goldman Sachs' estimate of their 2020 cash returns on cash invested, a measurement that compares the divides the companies' pre-tax earnings by their prices to identify stocks that with the potential to make large gains.
While high-dividend stocks have the reputation of being defensive and offering low growth - which might contribute to the lower prices of these stocks - Kostin's recommendations aren't concentrated in those parts of the stock market. His top 12 companies span the market, representing seven of the S&P 500's 11 major sectors.
Over the longer term, Kostin says he expects S&P 500 companies to raise their dividends by 3.5% a year over the next decade, but says swap market pricing implies growth of just 0.7%. That helps make the stocks that offer outsized dividend growth unusually inexpensive.
Here are the 12 stocks Goldman says will offer the highest estimated cash return on investment in 2020. They're listed in increasing order.