Top Dividend Stocks 2014-2024

"Only buy something that you'd be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years."
— Warren Buffett

This famous Warren Buffett quote got us thinking: what if you had purchased prominent stocks a decade ago, and simply held on (and reinvested dividends) through all the ups and downs?

To find "top" dividend payers, we looked through the constituents of the S&P 500 index (companies certainly considered "top" businesses), and we screened those constituents for a minimum 1% dividend yield.

Next, we took the companies that passed this screen and calculated the 10-year total returns for each with dividends reinvested, to find out what kind of return an investor would have experienced had they bought the stock a decade ago and pretended that the market was shut down — i.e. ignored the daily ups and downs of the market and just held on, in the spirit of the earlier Warren Buffett quote.

In this slideshow we present the 10 top dividend stocks of 2014 - 2024 resulting from this exercise. Continue below to see the top-dividend-stock results:

Continue to slide 1 »

Also recommended: TopDividends.com