The Dividend Daily

Another set of big-name financial sector earnings were released today. We’re getting set here at Dividend.com to dig much deeper into earnings results coming due the next couple of months.

BlackRock (BLK) and BB&T (BBT) saw gains on the heels of their results, with BlackRock also announcing a dividend hike in the process. Investors were not as keen on results from Citigroup (C) and Bank of America (BAC). Boeing (BA) shares reversed from an earlier drop and rallied to close positive, despite news the FAA was grounding the company’s new “787 Dreamliner” airplane.

Wall Street analyst upgrades pushed stocks like CBS Corporation (CBS) and Medtronic (MDT) higher. CBS was gaining on news the company is looking to implement a REIT strategy for its North American outdoor business (billboards), while selling its international outdoor operations. Despite the nice gains for the averages, cautious analyst commentary did have stocks like Williams-Sonoma (WSM), Mead Johnson Nutrition (MJN), and Yum Brands (YUM) lag for much of the day.

The Best Way to Deploy Capital into the Markets

We upgraded two new names to our “Recommended” list today, marking our first new recommendations of 2013. As we always say, there’s no reason to go crazy buying these names immediately, however. The game plan should be to regularly scale into positions month after month and avoid the need to time the markets. I can’t tell you how many investors have been sitting out the markets the last 3-4 years following the 2008 financial crisis. Instead of identifying names to add to during pullbacks, they went all in cash and have some unbelievable gains (share price appreciation as well as dividend increases).

The best way to deploy capital is over an extended period of time, by scaling into positions — whether we have good months or bad months in the markets. Sure, you might be able to side-step a sell-off from time-to-time, but over the course of years, you’ll probably miss as many good days as you will miss bad. Of course we never imply anyone should throw caution to the wind. We will whittle down our favorite names from time to time, but have never taken all of the names off at any one time.

Dividend investing is about putting as much money as you can to work consistently over a period of years. Your patience will be rewarded, as it has for decades for those who focus on building wealth by acquiring income-producing assets like dividend stocks.

Two New Dividend Stocks Recommended Today!

We added two new names to our recommended list this morning, so be sure to check out the first post as well as the second post detailing the upgrades if you missed the alert we sent out to Premium members earlier.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you tomorrow!

Be sure to visit our complete recommended list of the Best Dividend Stocks, as well as a detailed explanation of our ratings system here.