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: 💸 Financing the AI Buildout · Where Are We Now Part 6: How to Opt Out of the Bubble
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 · #11 a week ago · #11 a month ago
Stats worth sharing
Tracked since Sep 10, 2026 — 42 daily snapshots so far. The card below is built from what we track and refreshes nightly.
- Percentile
- Top 3%
- Best rank seen
- #10
- Rank, 7 days
- −1 place
- Rank, 30 days
- −1 place
- Subscribers added
- −2.0K
- Followers added
- −1.0K
- Posts
- 16
- Reactions per post
- 88
- Reactions tracked
- 3.2K
of 525 ranked finance newsletters
on Oct 1, 2026
since tracking began
since tracking began
last 30 days
average, recent posts
across 36 posts
Most-reacted post we have seen: 💸 Who is really to blame for Nike's collapse? — 126 reactions on Aug 24, 2026.
Recent posts
- 💸 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…
- Where Are We Now Part 2: The Greatest Capital Cycle in History
In part 1 we talked about the increasing stress on the consumer , and how the broad index seems to be ignoring it. But that when you look under the surface, the average individual stock is doing much more worse than the overall index. More than 1/2 of the stocks within the S&P 500 are down 20% or more from their highs. Source: Thierry from arvy on X The indexes are being propped up by the AI buildout. The spending is massive. The Wall Street Journal just published an article about the spending on AI. Between 2025 and 2032, we’re projected to spend nearly 3.7% of GDP on AI. U.S. GDP is about…
- Where Are We Now Part 1: Main Street vs Wall Street
I’ve always thought that s pending too much time on macroeconomics is a waste of time and energy. It’s too complex and there are too many moving parts . Trying to predict inflation, what the Fed will do at their next meeting, or where the S&P 500 will close out the year is usually a fool’s errand. It’s almost always better to spend you time looking at businesses, and understanding the moat, the cash flows, and how management allocates that capital. Notice that I said almost always. Every once in a while, things have shifted around enough that it’s worth taking a look at the macro. I think…
- Portfolio Update: October 2026
It’s been nearly 2 years since we launched the Compounding Dividends portfolio. The goal when we launched it was to build a reliable income stream, with a $5,000 per month (or $60,000 per year) target. Let’s see how close we are to that goal. Since the launch of the portfolio, we have: Zero dividend cuts Sold one company Had a cannibal stock initiate a dividend Had 11 companies increase their dividends since we bought them The average company has increased its dividend by more than 9%! If this were to continue, our income would double in about 8 years. If we look over a longer period, the…
- The 7 Deadly Sins of Investing (And How to Avoid Them)
Warren Buffett has spent over 70 years watching investors make the exact same mistakes over and over again. Today we’ll look at Buffett’s 7 Deadly Sins of Investing. And more importantly, learn how to avoid them! 1. Treating the Stock Market Like a Casino When markets get greedy, people start betting on momentum and stock prices. They forget that a share of stock is partial ownership of a real business with real products and real cash moving in and out the door. During the height of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, investors mocked Buffett for missing out on the ‘easy money’ in tech…
- 🎓 Invitation: LIVE MASTERCLASS
Hi Partner 👋 For years I’ve written about the companies I own. What I’ve never done is walk anyone through the entire process . The actual formula I run every business through before I invest a single dollar. Tomorrow, on Tuesday, September 29 I’m doing exactly that, live, for one hour. You’ll learn in which companies I personally invest my money. And on top of that I’m giving away $10.000 (!) worth of prizes. It’s free for you and there’s a live Q&A at the end. I’ll answer every single question you might have. Here’s what you will learn: The six things I check before buying a stock The…
- 💸 SCHD Shifts to Tech
Today is Dividend Day. The series where I teach you 5 things about dividend investing in less than 5 minutes. 1️⃣ SCHD Shifts to Tech The Schwab U.S. Dividend Equity ETF (SCHD) rebalances its portfolio every quarter to make sure no single stock or sector exceeds its index caps. The latest Q3 rebalance involved a sharp rotation back into Technology , increasing the sector's weight from 8.90% to 12.00%. Health Care got trimmed from 20.99% down to 18.77%. Individual stocks saw some big moves too: QCOM went from #18 to become the #1 holding at a 4.74% weight TXN went from #12 to the #2 spot at…
- Buying The Hidden Tollbooth in the Global Food Supply Chain
Walk down almost any aisle in your local grocery store , and you are looking at products made by a company you’ve probably never heard of. But the manufacturers of all that food know them well. They make the patented, specialized ingredients that give your favorite foods their texture, crunch, and sweetness. Right now, Wall Street is looking the other way. • The stock is trading at a significant discount to intrinsic value • Management estimates a single operational fix embeds ~$20/share in upside • The dividend yield sits above 3% with more than a decade of consecutive hikes • A pending…
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