J.M. Smucker (NYSE: SJM) might not get the same coverage afforded to its larger consumer defensive peers but its quality is just high. To add some weight to that assertion just consider these two facts. Firstly, the famed manufacturer of jams and peanut butter has increased its dividend in every year since the early 1960s. It has simply become a…

Occasionally I am asked why I don’t mention bonds more on the site. In fact I think the only dedicated article I’ve ever published on them was a case study of Vanguard’s Long-Term Treasury Fund. Anyway the reason behind the lack of fixed income articles here is twofold. Firstly, there’s really only so much you can say about owning bonds.…

A reader recently got in touch to ask about the merits of investing in funds versus individual stocks. For the most part I think this is the solution for most folks out there. I mean your average Joe doesn’t really care about why Coca-Cola is a better long-term bet than Alcoa. He just wants to allocate his savings in the…

The “dividend millionaire” stories are by far the most popular type of content on the site. Month after month it seems to rank number one in the list of search engine terms that brings folks here. The prospect of earning tens of thousands of dollars a month in passive income is obviously a big draw! Hopefully I can keep serving…

When it IPO’d back in June of 1972 Pennsylvania based cable operator Comcast had just over 40,000 subscribers. These days the (now much larger) company counts roughly twenty-two million TV subscribers and around twenty-five million for broadband. The total number of individual Comcast subscribers (i.e. incorporating cross selling and so on) stands at a shade under thirty million. Along the…

One thing I’ve brought up before on the site is the tendency for people to derive investment theses from stock price performances. The example I’ve referenced before is the case of McDonald’s (NYSE: MCD) stock between around late-2011 and mid-2015; a period in which the share price hovered somewhere between $90 and $100 (i.e. pretty much flat). McDonald’s: Thoughts On…

Perhaps it speaks to the strength of this nine-year bull market that I get excited whenever a good quality consumer stock trades below 15x earnings. Take brewing giant Molson Coors as a good example. Over the past two years the owner of brands such as Coors, Miller and Carling has seen its stock price slump nearly 40%. It owns a…

In its 2009 annual review the management of Coca-Cola (NYSE: KO) explained the importance of trademarked Coke products to the overall operation. The short version: Trademark Coca-Cola is the profit engine that propels everything else. (“Trademark Coca-Cola” is a term used by management to refer to the product category that includes the Coca-Cola Classic beverage and variants thereof (e.g. Diet…