4 NEW Dividend Increases You Need to Know About!

It's certainly been a volatile year for the S&P 500. 2026 has been wild, but the reality is we're now approaching the S&P 500 being up 10% year to date. This would be the fourth year in a row of doubledigit returns. But here's what's interesting and perhaps what most of us already know. The S&P 500, at least relative to historic averages, is trading well above its historic valuation multiples. And historically speaking, forward-looking returns have not been strong when the S&P 500 is trading in this valuation multiple range. However, there's a huge caveat to this. The argument you can make is that earnings growth is expected to increase in the following years, which would warrant a higher valuation multiple. And projections from JP Morgan agree with this. You can see a clear trend that earnings growth, particularly earnings per share growth, is picking up dramatically and is projected to continue to be strong in the following years. And while it's nearly impossible to predict what the market will look like in the short term, the reality is that growing earnings and growing free cash flow leads to growing dividends. So, in this video, we're going to be looking at four stocks that just recently announced dividend increases. Some of them being strong dividend growers and some of them being high yield stocks. So, let's go ahead and dive in. But first, I'd like to say thank you to Dividend Wealth for sponsoring this video, where you can currently get a 14-day free trial and 40% off at the link in the description. If you're tracking dividends by hand, then you're still making a huge mistake. Dividend Wealth just released a huge update where you can automatically connect your brokerage with your dividend wealth account. This makes it incredibly easy to see the dividends you have coming in, the future dividends that you'll collect, and to see exactly how far away you are from achieving your income goals. Dividend wealth doesn't just break down your portfolio allocation, but perhaps just as importantly, your income allocation, revealing some potential risk in your portfolio that you may not have been aware of. You can run different models to see exactly how far away you are from achieving your income goals. And with the dividend calendar, you'll know exactly when those dividend payments are going to be paid. They also just updated their three model portfolios. The dividend income strategy, the income growth strategy, and the balanced dividend strategy, where you can get deep insights into what developing an actual dividend portfolio should look like. So again, check out Dividend Wealth at the link in the description to get a 14-day free trial as well as 40% off. And the first stock we're going to be looking at is Fast and All who just announced an 8.3% dividend increase. So a very nice dividend hike. But of course, what's more impressive is the last 5 years. The stock is up by 76.8%. However, in the last year now, they're only up by about 4% and year-to date has been quite strong, better than the S&P 500, up 17.11%. Now, let's talk about them from a dividend perspective for a second. If we jump over to the dividend breakdown sheet, now what we'll see is actually very interesting. Yes, the starting yield right now is about 2%. But take a look at the capital allocation policy. How much they're generating in free cash flow versus the dividends they're paying out. Essentially, anytime free cash flow is higher, they increase the dividends. They do this by paying out a special dividend. And then in years where free cash flow is lower, you're going to get paid less in dividends. So essentially, the vast majority of their capital is being used to pay out dividends. If we look at the yearly dividend chart, you can see exactly when special dividends were paid out like in 2020, like in 2023. Now, why would that be the case? What type of business model do they have where they can occasionally pay out these large special dividends? Well, essentially, Fastenol distributes industrial and construction supplies. If we take a look at their recent investor presentation, look at their end market profile. 43% is heavy manufacturing. All other manufacturing is 32.8%. So this is primarily an industrial manufacturing company. Its results are very closely connected to factory activity and production volumes in the capital spending. So when manufacturing activity is strong, customers need more fasteners, safety products, tools, whatever you want to call it. And basically that's going to drive higher sales through fastenoffs, vending machines, and on-site locations. And fortunately for them, business has been quite strong particularly in the last 5 years. What you can see is revenue per share growth has been incredibly stable and consistent really over the last decade. We've seen it more than double and essentially grow slightly higher every single year. And because of the business model, debt to assets ratio is actually quite low and has even gotten as low as 8.75%. So it's a relatively high quality business model in reality. The company has simply decided it's in the best interest of their shareholders to pay out the majority of their earnings in the form of a dividend. Now, with that being said, we do need to point out from a valuation perspective, the company is trading at a premium relative to the market. The forward-looking PE multiple is now sitting at 37.27, which historically they do trade at a premium. That's about 12% higher than the historic average. Their 5-year average is around 33.24. So, it's a high quality business model, and this was another nice dividend hike, and when opportunities arise, there's no doubt they'll continue to pay out special dividends. The second stock that just announced a dividend increase is Enterprise Products Partners. And the dividend hike was quite small. In fact, it was about 1.8%. And to be fair, we do have to keep in mind that's a dividend hike that is technically below the rate of inflation. So, the overall income you're receiving, at least in terms of purchasing power, will be a little bit lower over the next year. That's something that a lot of people seem to miss. Now, that being said, EPD has done very well over the last year. It's done very well over the last 5 years, particularly if you also include the dividends that it's paid out. Why is that the case? Well, it's because this is a high yield stock. The stock is up about 20% in the last year, which also as we were heading into this year, I listed this as one of the two high yield opportunities heading into 2026. And one of the things we have to keep in mind is even with the 20% runup, it's still yielding over 6% at current prices. And if we just look at what that dividend yield looked like not too long ago before we entered into 2026, it was yielding closer to around 7%. Looks like it peaked at about 7.15% in November of 2025. So this was certainly a high yield opportunity and again year-to date it's done very well up by about 19.37% and well above 20% if you also include those dividend payments. Now one of the things we have to understand is the type of business that we're looking at. We're looking at an MLP, a master limited partnership. And oftent times the case for these high yield assets is the way we analyze their dividend payments is quite different. For MLPS, master limited partnerships, really what you want to look for is what their distributable cash flow per share actually looks like. So essentially, they pay dividends out of their distributable cash flows. And really, the correct term for this asset is not dividends, it's distributions. So we're looking at the distributable cash flow per share relative to the distributions that they're making. And what we can see is projected in 2026 is distributable cash flow per share $4.15 with dividends or distributions coming in at $2.26 per share. So the distributions are very very well covered. So this is a great sign. The dividends are very well covered. But it does raise the question if distributable cash per share is already growing at a healthy rate and it's easily covering the distributions. Why didn't they grow the distributions or the dividends by a higher amount? Why an only 1.8% dividend increase? Well, there's a couple of different things we could potentially point to. For one, if we jump over to the stock screener, you can see historically speaking, their shares outstanding have remained relatively stable. And in fact, in some instances, like over the last couple of years, they've actually slightly diluted shareholders. Now, it hasn't been much, but there has been slight dilution. Now, of course, that can be okay if they're generating a great return on the capital that they're raising from issuing shares, but at the same time, it is diluting shareholders. However, take a close look at what's happened so far in 2026. If we look at their investor deck for their 2026 outlook, one of the things they're stating is they're expecting an inflection point in excess cash flow available to allocate to unit buybacks and debt payown. So unlike Fast and All the stock we saw just a moment ago, this isn't a stock looking to purely reward shareholders in the form of a dividend. They're actively strengthening the balance sheet and looking to pursue share buybacks. So in reality, you could argue this is a more conservative high yield opportunity. The balance sheet is already incredibly strong. In fact, they have the highest credit rating in the midstream space. They already have very low leverage ratios, especially relative to their peers. So in reality, it's a conservative high yield opportunity. That's why short interest on this stock is so low only 0.76%. And in fact even analysts are projecting around 9 to 10% upside from its current share price. Typically for these type of companies for the valuation multiple you want to look at the enterprise value relative to their EBIT dot their earnings before interest taxes depreciation and amortization. And while they're trading slightly above their historic average it's really not that much of a difference with their valuation. I think this is still a relatively interesting stock at current prices if you're someone looking for high yield. Also, complete transparency like always, EPG is a company I own in my personal portfolio and it's been a more than 100% gainer for me personally and also my yield on cost for this position is amazing. It's approaching 10%. So, great total returns, great from a dividend perspective, and that distribution continues to go higher. Now, the third company we're going to look at on this list is Levi, stock ticker LEVI, and they just announced a dividend increase of 14.3%. So, an extremely strong dividend increase, and a stock is up about 14% in the last year, but in the last 5 years, it's a totally different story, down by about 15%. We went from trading at around $30 a share, down to around $13.40 40 cents per share and then in 2025 it bottom out close to around $13.50 but since then obviously performance has been relatively strong year to date up by about 17.29%. Now if we look at them from a dividend perspective you can see they're yielding above 2% but what we also need to make note of yes distribution growth dividend growth over the last 5 years has been quite strong. They've completely changed their capital allocation priorities. But also make note that the free cash flow from this stock has been very very choppy. And in my perfect world, I want to buy companies that have very predictable and stable and obviously high growing free cash flows. That's what the ultimate long-term sleep well at night businesses look like for me personally. Along with this, we can see there's a lot of institutions actively betting against this stock. Short interest is currently at about 7.42%. Now, with that being said, I will point out that in the recent earnings report, it wasn't just a dividend increase that they announced. They also increased their fullear 2026 revenue and EPS outlook, which obviously that's always good news. And it's part of the reason we've seen the stock climb higher, particularly in just the last few months alone. If we look at Ford earnings estimates for this stock, we can see analysts, although it doesn't get a lot of coverage, are projecting double-digit earnings growth over the next two to three years, which of course ultimately supports dividend growth. And from a valuation perspective, they're trading at a forward PE multiple of just 15.78. So a 15.78 forward PE multiple combined with double-digit earnings growth from a valuation perspective is actually extremely interesting. However, me personally, I would just have concerns with the long-term durability of this business model. The short-term outlook looks relatively strong, which I do think is part of the reason that analysts are projecting about 15% upside from current prices. I just don't think it's one of those stocks that you can buy and hold and sleep well at night. And then lastly, we have Ryder, who again announced a very nice dividend increase of 11%, a double-digit dividend increase. And what a year the stock has had up over 53% year-to date up nearly 40%. And anytime you see returns of this nature, naturally you should ask what is the source of this return? Is it primarily driven by something like earnings growth or is it primarily driven by a valuation multiple expansion? And in the case of Ryder, we can see this is primarily driven by valuation expansion. Multiple expansion. Last year, they were trading at a PE multiple on a trailing 12-month basis of about 14.93. It even got as low in October of 2025 of around 13.59. But now they're trading at a trailing 12 month PE multiple of 22.23. So, the market has assigned this stock a much higher valuation multiple and on a forward-looking basis, now they're sitting at about 18.39, which for reference is still lower than the average of the S&P 500. Now, if we talk about them from a dividend perspective and jump over to our dividend breakdown sheet, what you'll notice is right now the yield is around 1.4% and they have a history of growing dividends overall with a 5-year dividend cigar of around 10%. So, this recent dividend increase was a little bit higher than what we've seen on average over the last few years. Now, if you're paying attention, you already know something that at first glance might look concerning. Look at the free cash flow versus dividends paid out. This stock is free cash flow quite frequently. Why would that be the case? Well, take a closer look at the actual free cash flow analysis sheet. Remember, free cash flow is simply operating cash flows minus capital expenditures. Operating cash flows are the cash flows from the core business model. And then we have capex spending, which is basically the cash a company spends to either buy, build, or upgrade long-term assets. Now, the huge question when it comes to capex spending is, is the company's capex spending known as growth capex or maintenance capex? In other words, growth capex will actually unlock future revenue streams. Well, to answer that question, let's think about the business model for Ryder for a moment. Ryder is a truck leasing company. Buying trucks is a major capital expenditure, but it's also a core part of producing future lease revenue. So, the vast majority of this is growth capex spending. So, what we can see is the core business, the operating cash flows of the business are still growing at a relatively healthy rate over the last decade. And in fact, you can see this represented in the earnings payout ratio, which is sitting at just 27% for the company. These operating cash flows also don't account for something very important when thinking about their business model, which is the proceeds from vehicle and property sales, which for reference in around 2025, it was around 500 million, which would have put them very much so free cash flow positive. They were already free cash flow positive, but it would have put adjusted free cash flow closer to around 1 billion, which obviously makes that dividend look even more sustainable. So numbers are extremely important. I'm a huge numbers person. I'm a huge data person, but you can't look at them without understanding the core business model. That would be a huge mistake. Now, one of the things we will make note of when we jump over to their recent Q12026 earnings tech is one of the things they argue is that Ryder is in a much stronger business position today than it was at the peak of the 2018 freight cycle. 2018 was a very favorable year for trucking overall. But Ryder saying that they're in a much better position today. Why? Because there's been serious structural business improvements that have led to the growth recently rather than just a temporary hot freight market. You can see operating cash flows. In 2018, when the market was strong, was 1.7 billion, but in 2026 alone, it's at about 2.7 billion. Return on equity is stronger. Comparable earnings per share is significantly stronger. And if we look at the 2026 outlook, they're projecting the free cash flow forecast to be between 700 and 800 million, which naturally would pretty easily cover those dividend payments. For reference, last year that was around 145 million. So if we look at them from a valuation perspective, we can see right now the forward PE multiple sitting at 18.39, but it really doesn't even make sense to compare this to their historical valuation multiples because the business structure has gotten so much stronger as they highlighted over the last few years. The starting yield is above the average for the S&P 500 and they're growing the dividend now at around a double-digit rate. So definitely a stock to have on your watch list. So there you go. Those are four stocks that just recently announced dividend increases. Go ahead and let me know what you think in the comments down below.