Best High Dividend Stocks 2003-2023

"When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever."
— Warren Buffett

The quote above is one of Warren Buffett's most famous, and in the context of high dividend stocks it got us to thinking: which prominent high dividend stocks have delivered the top returns over a two-decade holding period for investment? We checked through the constituents of the S&P 500 index as a source of "top" companies, and screened for high yield — we used 4% current yield as our threshold.

Then, among those stocks that passed this initial screen, we next calculated the 2003 - 2023 total returns for each stock, with dividends reinvested over the holding period. In this slideshow, we present the results of this exercise: the top 10 best high dividend stocks ranked by two-decade total return, from within the S&P 500. Continue below to see the best-high-dividend-stock results:

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