Every week I run a dividend aristocrats screen across the full list, all 69 S&P 500 companies with at least 25 straight years of dividend increases. Same quality checks every time. Same yield history comparison against each stock’s own ten year range. This week’s screen just finished, and one number jumped out before I even looked at the individual names: zero sells.
Fifteen came back as buys. Six landed on watch. Twenty-nine sit in hold. Eleven are quality names trading at prices that don’t leave much room right now. Sixty-one of the sixty-nine passed the quality screen outright.
Here’s how this week’s dividend aristocrats screen broke down, and why the zero-sell result matters more than usual right now.
How a Dividend Aristocrats Screen Should Actually Work
Each stock has to clear six checks before price even enters the conversation: dividend growth, earnings growth, liquidity, institutional ownership, payout consistency, and the length of the increase streak itself. Only after a stock passes all six does yield zone come into play, meaning where the current yield sits compared to that specific stock’s own ten year range.
That order matters. Run a dividend aristocrats screen sorted by yield alone and you’ll pull up plenty of stocks that look generous for a bad reason. Screen for quality first and check the price second, and you get a much shorter, much more useful list. The official S&P Dow Jones Indices methodology for the Dividend Aristocrats index lays out the underlying 25-year requirement, and it’s worth a read if you want the formal criteria behind the list I’m screening every week.
What This Week’s Screen Turned Up
Clorox topped the buy list at a 5.10% yield with an A+ rating. Hormel Foods wasn’t far behind at 4.68%, also A+, which lines up with something that’s been in the financial press lately: Hormel shares are down double digits this year, and the pullback has pushed the yield into territory it doesn’t visit often.
Kimberly-Clark, T. Rowe Price, and Eversource Energy rounded out the top five, all A+, all yielding above 4%. Further down the list, familiar names like PepsiCo, Medtronic, Abbott, and Becton Dickinson cleared quality and landed in attractive yield territory too, even at more modest yields in the 2 to 3% range. A lower yield doesn’t disqualify a stock from being cheap in this kind of screen. It just means the stock’s normal range sits lower to begin with.
Roper Technologies made the buy list at a yield of just 1%, which sounds strange until you check its ten year history and realize that’s actually near the high end of where its yield typically sits.
The watch list held six names this round: Stanley Black & Decker, Genuine Parts, Illinois Tool Works, Colgate-Palmolive, Nordson, and Ecolab. All good businesses, all rated B+, none quite at a price that makes them urgent right now.
The Zero-Sell Result
Not one of the 69 came back flagged as an outright sell in this week’s dividend aristocrats screen. In a market that’s spent the year worrying about stretched valuations concentrated in a handful of AI names, that’s a fairly reassuring signal from the other side of the market, the boring side that doesn’t show up in the daily headlines.
That doesn’t mean everything’s cheap. Eleven names landed in wait, meaning solid businesses trading at prices that don’t leave much margin for error right now. Walmart, Caterpillar, and S&P Global are all quality companies, all priced for it at the moment.
Why I Run a Dividend Aristocrats Screen Weekly, Not Quarterly
Prices move. A stock sitting in hold this week can drift into buy territory after a pullback, or out of it after a run. Quality shifts too, just slower. Running the screen every week instead of every few months means I catch the window while it’s actually open.
Try This Week’s Screen Yourself
I built the screening process into an app because doing this by hand across 69 stocks, every week, got old fast. It runs the six point quality check and the yield zone comparison automatically and sorts everything by what’s actually worth a second look.
You don’t need the full Analyst Dashboard to try this yourself. The free Stock Analyzer at fluentboost.com/free runs the same quality checks and yield history comparison, no card required, up to 5 stocks a day. That’s plenty to check a handful of names from this week’s list yourself, even if it’s not the full 69-stock bulk screen. In a market this narrow, it’s worth knowing what the other companies are doing while everyone’s staring at the same ten stocks.
https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/indices/dividends-factors/sp-500-dividend-aristocrats
Related Articles
