Best Dividend paying stocks?

From the community’s experience, what are the best paying dividend stocks on freetrade? I’m starting to build a portfolio of stocks with a view of generate a regular income. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

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Best or highest? Google for us and uk dividend aristocrats if you want the most reliable long-term.

Highest / most reliable, either really. I’m just looking to build a good portfolio of dividend paying stocks and ETF’s. Google is out of my league until we get fractional shares (which is very exciting).

Sorry, I meant you can use google to look for ‘dividend aristocrats US’ or ‘dividend aristocrats UK’ to get companies that have never cut their dividends and always raised in the last decades, e.g. Coca Cola. The company Google (correctly named Alphabet) does not actually pay a dividend.

Excellent, I’ll have a look. Thanks.

Bear in mind that a large number of previously great dividend payers have cut the dividend to save cash in this lockdown. Most of them will probably resume dividends, but it’s not the best time for dividend investors

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Agree, some of the great dividend payers like Shell haven’t cut their dividend since the Second World War and have a yield over 10%…
…then the bottom fell out of the oil market and yesterday they slashed their dividend by 75%.

It’s all a bit up in the air at the moment.

Look for good stocks that you think will survive and thrive in the current conditions and will be around after the world settles into a new norm.
Then check out their dividends on somewhere like Dividendmax.com

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One thing I would add is to diversify.

As mentioned above, oil is slippery at the moment (ignore the pun) so can’t be relied upon even with a great track record like Shell. So add stocks from various sectors.

Dependant on your price range and with the introduction of fractional shares, look at maybe pharmaceutical companies, food & drink, telecom etc (sectors people need for day to day living) so if one or two sectors let you down in the short term you can always rely on the rest of your portfolio to see you through. There’s no guarantee but whatever makes you feel better!

I use https://www.dividend.com/ and Yahoo Finance which I find really helps

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This is exactly my plan next. (That’s why i’d really like to have watchlist sorting in FT, so i can have those stocks in a separate list.)
As a result i was wondering how much i’d need to invest to get a reasonable income. In more normal times, what sort of income do people with dividend stocks in their portfolio achieve per month/quarter?

There’s a thread for that, not many people have put a figure on it though

Around £250,000 to achieve £9-£11k per year.

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You can work backwards to calculate how much you would need invested as capital to deliver your desired return.

If your target is £10k per annum & you assume a 4% yield as an average dividend across your portfolio, you’d need an initial portfolio value of £250k. (£10k / 0.04).

https://siblisresearch.com/data/ftse-all-total-return-dividend/ Provides quite a useful high level summary to gauge the average FTSE 100 yields over the last 5 years.

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This link might help, its a list of companies that have recently cut or suspended their dividends. It wont be exhaustive, but there is a decent amount of information there. Most if not all will resume at some point if you are buying long, but its worth knowing for the short term.

(Of course it helps to post the link!) https://www.reddit.com/r/dividends/comments/fhfgsf/coronavirus_dividend_cut_list/

A lot of work to be done then! Thanks all for the answers and information.

Don’t forget the incumbent of 11 Downing St. will want a chunk of that £10k.

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how long must you own the stock before the diveden in full is payed

how long. must. you own a stock in your name. before the full dividend is payed

Each dividend paying stock has a date it pays out, and a date you must own it to receive that payment - thats called the ex dividend date.

i.e. IMB last ex dividend date was 7th Feb 2020 and the payout date was 10th Mar 2020. The next ex dividend date is 7th May with the next payout date 10th June.

In theory you can sell the share after the ex dividend date and still receive the payout but I dont know how frequent people do that in real life.

how long must a stock be held in your name,.,. before you claim the full dividend payment

There is no time frame. You have to have hold it on the ex date of a dividend payment. You can just google the ex dates of any stock online or on the company’s investor relation site.