Compounding Dividends
A newsletter about Dividend Investing from an ex-professional investor | REAL money is invested in the Portfolio.
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What they write about
Dividend investing from a former professional investor, built around a rated investable universe and a monthly buy-hold-sell list. Recurring features include high-yield portfolio tracking, valuation work, and profiles of well-known fund managers such as Tom Gayner and David Einhorn.
- dividend investing
- high yield
- portfolio updates
- valuation
- fund managers
Recent examples: Adding To Our High Yield Portfolio · 💸 Bonds Now Yield More Than Equities
Written from Compounding Dividends’s own published post titles and openings in Sep 11, 2026. It describes the subjects the newsletter covers, not its views, and is not investment advice.
Growth history
Subscribers (thousands, nightly)
275K on Sep 10, 2026 → 273K on Oct 21, 2026
Followers (thousands, nightly)
Rank in Substack’s finance leaderboard: #12 today · #12 a week ago · #11 a month ago
Stats worth sharing
Tracked since Sep 10, 2026 — 62 daily snapshots so far. The card below is built from what we track and refreshes nightly.
- Percentile
- Top 3%
- Best rank seen
- #10
- Rank, 30 days
- −1 place
- Followers added
- −921
- Posts
- 11
- Reactions per post
- 89
- Reactions tracked
- 3.8K
of 525 ranked finance newsletters
on Oct 1, 2026
since tracking began
last 30 days
average, recent posts
across 43 posts
Most-reacted post we have seen: 💸 Who is really to blame for Nike's collapse? — 126 reactions on Aug 24, 2026.
Recent posts
- Adding To Our High Yield Portfolio
Howdy Partner 👋 Investing regularly in high-yield, high-quality businesses is one of the most reliable ways to build income. That’s why we are adding $5,000 every month to Our High Yield Portfolio. We’ll add to two stocks we already own that both offer very attractive yields The power of Dividend Reinvestment Let me tell you a little secret.… High yield doesn’t have to mean high risk. Many investors think that a high dividend yield automatically means a business is in trouble, or that it isn’t reinvesting enough capital to grow. But historically, companies in the top 40% of dividend yields…
- 💸 Bonds Now Yield More Than Equities
Today is Dividend Day. The series where I teach you 5 things about dividend investing in less than 5 minutes. 1️⃣ Utilities and The Mag 7 Now Move In Opposite Directions Through 2025, utilities and the Magnificent 7 stocks traded together. Utilities were seen as beneficiaries of the AI buildout. But in 2026, that correlation has completely reversed. Source: Jeff Weniger on X 2️⃣ Bonds Now Yield More Than Equities The 10-year Treasury yield (5.24%) is above the S&P 500's forward earnings yield (5.01%). The earnings yield simply measures how much companies are expected to earn relative to their…
- Cutting The Weeds and Watering The Flowers
Hi Partner 👋 In Part 1 , we zoomed out to look at the macro environment and the math behind our growing income. In Part 2 , we zoomed in to look at every single business in Our Portfolio through a simple stoplight framework. We identified a few Red Tier stocks that it might be time to think about selling. But selling a stock is only half the battle. If we are going to free up capital from businesses, we also have to figure out what to do with it. Remember Opportunity Cost. We only want to sell a position if we have a better place to put the money. We’re looking to improve our forward returns…
- Evaluating Every Stock in Our Portfolio
Hi Partner 👋 On Monday, we looked at how the income from Our Portfolio has been compounding and a bit of the macro picture right now. Today it’s time to look at every single position in Our Portfolio. We’re going to be skeptical and make sure every company still deserves its spot. Why? Because as investors, we can’t be complacent. Businesses change, new competitors show up, and we learn more about each business the longer we own it. We need to make sure that we’re not holding stocks out of laziness and ignoring real problems in the business. We need to be willing to kill good ideas for even…
- A Fresh Look at Our Dividend Portfolio
Hi Partner 👋 I hope you are doing well. It has been nearly 2 years since we launched the Compounding Dividends portfolio. It’s time to look through what we’ve built and see if we can make it even better! The goal was crystal clear from day one: Build a stable, growing income stream Target $5,000 per month (or $60,000 per year ) Today, let’s take a look at our progress. Our Scorecard A quality dividend portfolio should be durable. I think ours is. Since launch: Zero dividend cuts Only one company sold One cannibal initiated a brand new dividend 11 companies increased their payouts since we…
- Best Buys October 2026
A new month, a new Best Buys List. Each month, I’ll give an overview of my favorite stocks of the month. Let’s dive into this update and show you some of my favorite stocks. September 2026 The S&P 500 is up +2.3% in the past month. Source: Fiscal.ai Investors are fearful today according to the Fear & Greed Index : Best & Worst Performers This overview shows you the best and worst performers in our investable universe. Worst performers The cheaper we can buy great companies, the better. The biggest decliner this month? Arbor Realty, losing 38%. Arbor Realty Trust is a mortgage real estate…
- Buy-Hold-Sell List Update October 2026
👋 Howdy Partner, Our investable universe currently contains 213 stocks rated ‘buy’. Last month there were 196. Let’s look at this month’s Buy-Hold-Sell list update and see what interesting opportunities we can find! Buy-Hold-Sell List The Buy-Hold-Sell List filters our very large Investable Universe. We look for cheap Dividend Stocks based on three valuation methods: The PEG Ratio Current Yield vs Historical Reverse Dividend Discount Model Based on this, we give each company a Buy, Hold, or Sell recommendation. Update September 2026 Some Interesting Stats: 213 companies total receive a ‘buy’…
- 💸 Financing the AI Buildout
Today is Dividend Day. The series where I teach you 5 things about dividend investing in less than 5 minutes. 1️⃣ The S&P 500 Has a 63% Payout Ratio The red line in the image shows the growth of corporate earnings. The blue line shows the percentage of cash these companies are returning via dividends and buybacks. That ratio has gone from 80% to 90% down to 63% today . Source: Aswath Damodaran on X 2️⃣ AI Needs to Become 9% of the Economy A Columbia/Brookings study estimated that AI needs to become 8.8% of the entire US economy for an adequate return on invested capital. That is about what…
- Where Are We Now Part 6: How to Opt Out of the Bubble
Over the past five articles, we’ve taken a deep dive into the macro environment and the AI buildout. We’ve looked at the stressed consumer , the massive CapEx spending, and the physical limits of the power grid. Today, we’re going to talk about how this all could unwind, and where I actually want to invest. Let’s do a quick recap of how we got here. In Part 1 , we looked at the consumer . Wages haven’t kept up with inflation, savings are dropping, and the average stock in the S&P 500 is actually struggling. In Part 2 , we looked at AI CapEx . Tech companies are spending trillions, taking on…
- Where Are We Now Part 5: The Illusion of Safety
We’ve looked at how the AI boom is keeping the market afloat , how it’s being financed , and some of the limitations it’s now hitting. The obvious question now is why hasn’t the bubble popped yet? To answer that we have to understand some shifts in market structure. We talked about some of this in my series on why Terry Smith is changing his strategy . A lot of what’s keeping the market up is the constant influx of passive flows . To understand why they keep coming, we need to look at how Americans save for retirement. The De Facto National Pension The most common retirement plan used to be a…
- Where Are We Now Part 4: Cracks in the Foundation
We’ve talked about the potential issues with inflated demand, depreciation expenses, and circular financing . But my concerns with the AI build out go beyond that. Even if we assume that the demand is really as high as they claim it is, and even if we assume that the funding is unlimited, there are still issues. A great example is the Project Jupiter data center in New Mexico. It’s one of the Project Stargate data centers that’s being developed by Blue Owl Capital with Oracle as a main tenant. The data center needs its own 2.45-gigawatt power plant that constantly produces electricity to run…
- Where Are We Now Part 3: Smoke, Mirrors, and Phantom Demand
In part 1 we talked about the increasing stress on the consumer , and how the broad index seems to be ignoring it. In part 2 we talked about th e AI Capex spending that’s propping up the index. Today we’re going to talk about how that’s getting paid for. The Spending is Massive The AI buildout currently going on is expected to be the biggest infrastructure buildout in history. Source: Wall Street Journal Hyperscalers like Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle are expected to spend around $8000 billion this year, and more than a trillion dollars in each of the next few years on AI. That’s going…
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Data: Substack public leaderboards and publication archives, refreshed nightly, plus public beehiiv sitemaps and recommendation pages, refreshed weekly. Source for this page: Compounding Dividends. Subscriber counts are Substack’s own rounded public figures, so week-on-week changes move in steps. beehiiv audience sizes are self-reported by the publisher and are not verified. Last snapshot: Nov 10, 2026.