2 Beaten-Down Ultra-High-Yield Dividend Stocks That Are Historically Cheap and Begging to Be Bought Right Now

One of the greatest aspects about putting your money to work on Wall Street is there are countless ways to grow your wealth. Regardless of your risk tolerance or investment focus, there are thousands of individual companies and/or exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that can meet your criteria.

But among this endless sea of possible investment strategies, one tends to rise above the pack. I’m talking about buying high-quality dividend stocks and hanging onto these positions over an extended timeline.

Recently, the analysts at Hartford Funds, in collaboration with Ned Davis Research, updated their data sets from an extensive study on dividend stocks that was released last year (“The Power of Dividends: Past, Present, and Future”). This duo compared the performance and volatility of dividend-paying stocks to non-payers over a half century (1973-2023).

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Following the recent update, Hartford Funds found that non-paying public companies averaged a 4.27% annual return over the prior half-century, and were 18% more volatile than the benchmark S&P 500. By comparison, dividend payers delivered a 9.17% average annual return over the prior 50 years, and did so while being 6% less volatile than the S&P 500.

Companies that are regularly sharing a percentage of their profits with investors tend to be profitable on a recurring basis and are often able to provide transparent long-term growth outlooks. In short, these are businesses we’d expect to rise in value over time and make their patient shareholders richer.

But not all dividend stocks are created equally. Although some ultra-high-yield stocks — “ultra-high-yield” in the sense that their yields are at least four times higher than the S&P 500 — are more trouble than they’re worth, select high-octane income stocks can be true gems.

What follows are two beaten-down ultra-high-yield dividend stocks — with an average yield of 7.57% — that are historically cheap and ripe for the picking by opportunistic income seekers.