November 2025 Dividend Growth Investor Newsletter

Welcome to the November 2025 edition of the Dividend Growth Investor Newsletter. I wanted to thank you for subscribing and following along my investment journey with this real money portfolio.

I am using commission-free brokers Etrade and Schwab for this portfolio. I am not paying any commission costs to buy or sell shares, which definitely helps keeping costs low. I view brokerage costs as a commodity service, where the lowest cost provider is the one that executes my trades.

In this report, I will share the companies I invested in this month. In addition, I will briefly discuss those holdings in more detail in the PDF newsletter linked in this post. I also discussed my thoughts on diversification. This discussion started with last months newsletter as well.

The process I took to identify the companies for further research is based on a few guidelines I follow on valuation, stability of fundamentals and dividend dependability. I try to focus on companies which have a higher chance of paying and growing a dividend throughout the economic cycle. I buy dividend stocks for the dividend checks. I want to have a reasonable assurance that those checks will continue to be paid and to grow over time. I do not want to stress over the safety of distributions during the next recession.

As a result, I try to focus on companies with recurring revenues streams. I also try to focus on companies where I see some stability in demand for products or services. I also try to analyze fundamentals for each company, including trends in earnings, revenues, dividends and payout ratios, in an effort to understand if the dividend payment is sustainable. The fundamental analysis also answers my question as to whether the dividend is on a solid footing for future growth.

The list of companies I follow is derived from my decade-long observation of the companies in the dividend aristocrat and dividend champion lists. I have also spent a decade reviewing the list of dividend increases almost every week. The list includes a lot of companies that are great, but unfortunately have a high valuation.

If you have followed me for a while, you know that I try to set controls in place to avoid overpaying for a company (or getting carried away by enthusiasm from an attractive dividend growth stock). I try to avoid paying more than 20 times forward earnings for a company. However, I also try to review valuations in the context of earnings and dividends growth. As I mentioned in the last newsletter, there is a trade-off between yield and dividend growth. In the portfolio construction process, I try to balance that trade-off by selecting companies that are in different phases of their dividend growth cycle.

For example, I may like a certain company. However, I would not pay more than 25 times forward earnings for the stock. Investors are excited about the company’s prospects for the future. However, I would not want to pay over 25 times forward earnings. With a valuation above 25 times forward earnings, there is a lower margin of safety if something goes wrong. If the perception for company’s future growth changes to a more pessimistic one, the business will likely sell for less than 25 times earnings. Alternatively, if the business doesn’t grow as expected, paying 25 times forward earnings could be seen as too high of a valuation. Given the fact that there are other companies available below 25 times earnings, I believe capital may be better allocated with them.

The companies companies I bought in November include: