Reviewing My Entire $353,196 Dividend Portfolio

This is my dividend growth stock portfolio $353,196. That's the highest number I've reported so far in my monthly portfolio updates. And the value of the account has grown by more than $14,000 over the past year. I've documented this exact account every single month on the channel going all the way back to May 2020. At that time, it was worth $30,000, and my investing journey was just beginning. Now, that same account pays me $12.6,000 in annual dividends. That's almost half the initial portfolio value I started with. Over the next year, it's projected to pay me $1,050 on average every month. And the real number is likely going to be higher than that. And just over the past month, this account's value has risen by $24,243. So, I'm at the point now that in the span of a month, I can nearly gain the entire portfolio value that I started with. This is the compounding effect of long-term investing at work, and it's still just getting started. So, today, I'm going to go through every single position I owned in my dividend growth stock portfolio, explain what my plan is with each, whether I'm considering buying more or just holding. I'll show you how I'm investing for my financial future to create a long-term investing strategy that reliably compounds. So, with that said, let's roll the intro and get into this month's portfolio update. >> [music] [music] >> The following reflects the opinions of a man who spends far too much time thinking about stocks. Please do your own research before making any investment decisions. Nothing in this video is personal financial advice. Continue at your own risk. My name is Zach. This is Dividend Data, and you should leave a like and subscribe to the channel if you enjoy the video. Throughout, I'm going to be using the portfolio tracker, which is available at dividenda.com, my stock research website. So, if you find it interesting, click the link below and you can track your portfolio like I do. So, as I mentioned, I've been documenting the progress of this portfolio every month going back to 2020. At that time, this account was valued at $30,000, and I have learned a ton of lessons along the way. The account has changed quite a bit in its composition, and it looks very different in today's form than it did when I started. And this is a natural part of investing. You continue to learn as you go along. The most important part is just starting. Now, personally, I choose to invest in individual stocks. These are often well-known companies and I focus on businesses that are continually growing over time. Both in the dividend payments that they pay you, so you're getting dividend raises year after year, but also in the actual earnings of the business. Because after all, if the business is growing, the asset itself becomes more valuable and they will have more cash left over to pay you as dividends. And I'm on the younger side, so I have a long time horizon. I am optimizing primarily for total return. There are some older dividend investors that focus a lot more on the income they're getting right now, and I definitely own quite a few higher yield positions as well in my account, but my primary goal is to focus on the long-term compounding. Dividends can be an important part of that, as I'll explain later. And the reason why I like dividend investing is that mentally clicks that you're an owner in the business. You're not just investing in some random price that wiggles up and down. You own a share in the company and you get paid out a dividend, a percentage of the company's profits. And this is an aspect of your total return in the stock market that you can control. You can't control what stock market prices do in the next week or next month. We could enter a contraction or a downturn, but you can control trying to buy companies that are less likely to cut a dividend payment in a downturn, continue paying you income in that time, and even grow their payments in that time. So these are real businesses generating real profits that they can pay you out as dividends throughout the year. Most companies pay quarterly, some pay monthly, some pay annually, some pay semianually, so twice a year. And this is money that you can take as cash. You could use it for personal expenses. Some people love dividend stocks as a retirement strategy because it gives you a reliable form of income. You can manage and control. You own assets which pay you income. It kind of puts you in the perspective of a business owner. But if you don't need the money, the most powerful thing you can do is actually taking that cash and the dividends that you're paid and reinvesting it into buying more stock. Reinvesting it to get more ownership in these companies. Either the same one that's dividend reinvestment or drip or taking that cash and buying a different stock, whatever you think's a good buy at the time. This over time has a huge compounding effect. So, since I've started investing in this account, I've earned $29,345 of dividends, and I have reinvested all of that to buy more stock. So, again, I started this account with $30,000. And yes, I've added more and more money over time, of course, but the process of getting this started, I've already earned $30,000 in dividends, and I've reinvested all of that. And this impact of stock price appreciation as in stock prices going up, dividend reinvestment, dividend raises and time, which is the most important component. All of these things combined create a huge compounding effect that us dividend investors call the dividend snowball effect. So before I get into forecasting what my account will do, let's go through all of my holdings. What are my largest ones? How much they pay me, whether I'm planning to buy more or continue holding. So, I personally have a very concentrated portfolio of individual stocks. I have seven holdings. When I started, I had 50 holdings with a much smaller dollar amount. And one of the personal strategies I've adopted as I've gone along is going heavier in my high conviction companies. But when you're learning and starting out, I wouldn't necessarily recommend that. And in general, for most people, especially if you're not doing this for a living, I would suggest diversified index funds and ETFs. And then you can sprinkle in individual stocks as you continue to learn and adapt. Don't just blindly follow whatever I do. So my top holding is Hess Midstream LP, ticker symbol HSM, and that's a company probably most of you have never heard of. I bought this during 2025, and right now I have a total return of 27.61%. And you can see that's higher than my unrealized gains, which is up 20.9%. I've reinvested dividends in that time and earned 102 more shares in the company. And this is my top dividend payer by far. Now, I'll be doing a full stock analysis update on HSM in the future, probably this week because they report earnings this week. But one of the main reasons why I own this company is because of the dividend. They grow their dividend payment every single quarter. And I have evaluated the company as being a sustainable dividend payer that I'm expecting to have continued slow dividend increases year after year. And this is a high yield stock, by the way, a 7.63% 63% forward-looking dividend yield. They just announced another dividend increase of 1.23%. And you can see that this is my largest dividend payer by far. Over the next year, it's projected to pay me $8,038 in annual dividend income. The next dividend payment is $2,09. This was just recently declared, and I have to buy it before August 6th if I want more shares to be counted and pay the most recent dividend. That's what X dividend date means. I will be paid that dividend on August 14th. And this is going towards what's considered my biggest month of dividend income, $2364. HSM is the majority of that by far. And the other company is a very similar mid-stream oil and gas stock. That's MLXLP, ticker symbol MLX. I'll be talking about that in a bit. So, you can see HSM is 29.45% of my current portfolio value in the dividend account. Over the past few months, I've been treating this stock as a hold because I bought a ton over the last year, but over the long term, I think I will be a net adder to HSM and probably will start dollar cost averaging in again more. The yield is still attractive. The dividend growth is still there and I think it offers a pretty good risk adjusted total return since a lot of that is coming from the reliable high yield dividend. Now, the second stock I own is Microsoft, tick symbol MSFT. This is a very different company. You've heard of this one. One of the leading big tech companies. And I own just under $100,000. And in my dividend portfolio, this has been my biggest buy of 2026. And again, I mentioned I'm focused on the total return over the long run. So probably half of this position I bought this year. I bought a bunch during 2022 as well. My average cost per share is $337. And overall, I have a 39.85% total return. And even though it's one of my top stocks, the actual dividend income the company pays me is much lower, $783 over the year. And that's because this is a low yield company, a 0.78% dividend yield. Most recently in June, they paid me a $223 dividend. But as I mentioned earlier, the long-term value of a company is really derived from the future earnings it will generate. So, if you're investing long-term, so over the period of decades, you can't forget about growth. As you can see, when we're taking a look at Microsoft stock, its earnings per share over the past 10 years is up 506%. That's 20.25% compound annual growth rate. Over the trailing 12 months, the company's generated $1728 in adjusted earnings per share. That's up 26.69% year-over-year. Now, Microsoft's dividend is a lot less. Over the trailing 12 months, they paid $3.56 of dividends. The forward-looking dividend payment for Microsoft is $364. So much less than their earnings per share. They have a 19.8% earnings payout ratio. And the actual stock price over the long run is valued based on the earnings and cash flow the company generates. So Microsoft, they generate a lot more earnings and free cash flow and operating cash flow than they pay in dividends. And it's a faster growing company. So they have a premium multiple that they trade at. So that's why you see the lower 0.78% dividend yield. And while I'm a big believer in dividends, they are not everything. So Microsoft stock, it's not expensive because it's a low dividend yield. That really isn't the right mindset you should be looking at it. You have to be looking to the business and the cash flows it generates. And yes, Microsoft has a low yield, but it's actually in the historic range of its typical dividend yield it trades at. And arguably based on the earnings per share, Microsoft is still cheap today even after it went up a ton after earnings. They just reported earnings this week and went up 19%. I did a full Microsoft stock analysis video with my updated thoughts. You should definitely go watch that, especially if you're into the more in-depth stock analysis. So, Microsoft stock, my second largest holding, 28.31% of the account, a much smaller percentage of the actual dividend income I earn. As I mentioned earlier, I've been buying a lot throughout the year, and if the stock dips again after its recent surge, I'll probably be adding to that position. I view Microsoft as a decade long holding I can have in this account, maybe even longer. I see a long growth horizon for the company, and I'll probably be a net buyer. My third largest holding in this account is Alphabet, ticker symbol G OG L. This is $56,000, and I have a 119% total return on this stock. and I purchased this position during 2025. So, it's been a great performer for me. Similar to Microsoft, this is a low yield stock. They're actually new to paying dividends at all, even though this has been a profitable company for decades. So, it's my lowest dividend payer at $139 a year. And similar to Microsoft, this is a company with a strong dominant market position. They continue to grow their operating cash flow and earnings year after year. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, they generated 185.68 68 billion of operating cash flow over the trailing 12 months. That's up 38.8% year-over-year. And it's one of the best cash generating businesses in the history of capitalism. Now, you can see their free cash flow is much lower because they're putting that money to work and they're spending it to build AI data centers. I've been covering this a lot on the channel in my Microsoft stock analysis, my latest Google stock analysis, and even my meta stock analysis I did earlier this week, and even the Amazon stock analysis. Google's 16% of this dividend growth portfolio. I view this as a decade type holding as well. I will be adding to Alphabet over time, especially if there's any sell-offs. My fourth largest position is a little bit of a newer one, which is Nvidia. And I'm not up at all right now, but I bought it a month ago, so I'm not really expecting a lot. Now, this may be surprising to some people, and they're actually already paying me more dividends than Alphabet, $150. Now, Nvidia, it's a low yield dividend company, and they historically were not a dividend grower at all, but they recently raised their dividend payment by 2,400%. Yes, you heard that correctly. And the reason is that they are generating insane cash right now. Adjusted earnings per share is up 83% year-over-year. They're hitting all-time highs every quarter. They're going to hit another all-time high this quarter and the quarter after that. You can see their operating cash flow is growing massively. Over the trailing 12 months, they've generated $119 billion in free cash flow, 48 billion in just the latest quarter, up 85% year-over-year. And again, this number is going up. So, they're going to be on a runway of 200 billion plus in free cash flow, probably growing to 300 billion and then 400 billion. And it's why the company is the most valuable business in the world at a 4.86 trillion market cap. And one of the main reasons I add it to my portfolio, I own quite a bit in my Roth IRA, and I feel fairly confident it will do very well over the next two to three years, possibly over five years. The problem with Nvidia and whether or not I'll own it 5 to 6 years from now, I'm not entirely sure. It really depends on how the AI data center buildout evolves. I feel very confident in the spending and buildout over the next two to three years. as companies like Microsoft and Amazon, they continue to pour massive capex. A large chunk of that is going straight to Nvidia to buy their systems. So I own the companies that are spending a lot on the AI infrastructure like Microsoft, Alphabet. I own a little bit of Amazon and another account. And I think over the long run that will be good business moves for them. But in the short run that's impacting the free cash flow of all those companies. So I've added the other side of that. the company who's making all of the profits off of this AI infrastructure. So, in terms of Nvidia being in this dividend portfolio, we'll see how it evolves as a long-term holding. Right now, I'm pretty much committed to 2 years and then I'm going to re-evaluate after that. Next up, I have the Altria Group, ticker symbol M O. This is valued at $26,000. I have a 107% total return on the holding, and this is my second largest dividend payer at $1,627. They make most of their profits related to cigarettes. They own Philip Morris USA and historically it's been a fantastic performer in the stock market and it's been one of the prime examples of showing the impact of reinvested dividends. They continue to raise their dividend payment every single year. It's been growing at 4% 5-year compound annual growth rate. The current dividend yield is 6.21%. So, it is a higher yield stock. However, when I bought the stock and historically I was buying at like a 9% dividend yield, which was a historically great time to buy the stock in terms of dividend yield, the stock was ridiculously cheap for a number of years. And it's arguably just around fair value cuz if we zoom out over 10 years here, you can see this is a middle of the pack dividend yield for Ultria stock. I think we just got blessed with a good entry point from 2022 to 2024. And in my dividend account, it's the largest dividend pair in the history since I've had it much longer. It's paying me $7.61,000. I've reinvested all of that to buy more shares. And I've actually trimmed some of this position down to help with some of my Microsoft purchases and the Nvidia purchase. And part of that logic was the idea that for these kinds of lower growth stocks, you got to buy it cheap. And if they start to get priced too high, you definitely don't want to be buying more at these high prices. you'll just get a lower total return. And while if I have infinite money, I probably wouldn't have sold it, but I do have a limited amount of capital and I have to pick where I want to invest. So, I did a slight trim, but I do like the Altra Group as a long-term dividend holding. So, right now, Altra Group is a hold and I have done some trimming. Stock number six that I'm going to share today is MLX. I have $19,300 of this. It's 5.5% of the account. I have a 28.05% total return. And I purchased this a lot in 2025 along at the same time as I was buying HSM. HSM was a little bit cheaper, which is why I purchased more of it. And overall, I like both of these stocks as a high yield dividend growth company. It's a rare combination of high yield and high growth. You can see over the past 10 years, their dividends grown 111%. That's a 7.76% compound annual growth rate for a company with a 7.37% dividend yield. And you can see their two most recent dividend increases were even higher at 12.55% and 12.55%. And while compared to the recent dividend yields for MLX, it has been cheaper, it still is arguably an attractive buy at today's price. And I'll do an updated stock analysis this coming week. So despite it being one of my lower holdings, it's my third largest dividend payer, $1,421. The next dividend payment is this month. I'll be getting paid $355. payment dates August 14th. So, I'll be getting these two big dividends this month, and I will be reinvesting both of those to buy more shares. So, in the month of August, I'll have $2,364 that I'll be reinvesting to buy more shares. And this is not new money that I'm adding to the account. This is income my portfolio generates, which I will be using to buy more ownership in these stocks. My current plan is to continue buying MLX. Similar to HSM, I am viewing these as long-term holdings. I even though I'm making videos about this, I kind of hope the market doesn't even know these exist. And they're pretty boring companies, so the broader market will forget about them. But I just want to continually dollar cost average. And in terms of the income side of my dividend portfolio, I think these can be core pillars. And I think the snowball effect will be massive. When I'm getting $2,000 plus dollars of dividends reinvested, I'm getting sizable chunks of shares. As an example, with ATSM, I'll be getting roughly 50 new shares of the stock. And what does that mean? Yes, they'll be having a dividend raise probably in their next payment. But even if we use this one, 50 more shares means I'll be getting paid $39.50 before there's a dividend raise more. So, it just creates this snowball effect of every payment getting larger, allowing me to buy even more shares, and it just keeps compounding. And the addition of HSM and MLX have been kind of a gamecher in my dividend income. You can see that my dividend income was consistently growing when I started investing and that was when I had that 50 stock portfolio. I was much more focused on a bunch of dividend stocks. I owned a ton of the dividend aristocrats and kings. But as I started to learn more and I just optimized more for total return. I transferred more to some low yield stocks, some of the big tech companies and that's helped a lot with my portfolio value matching kind of what the market's doing. But I'm now getting this increase in dividend income again since I added these midstream oil and gas stocks. I've almost eclipsed my 2025 dividend income of $7,000 and in the coming year I'm projected $12.6,000. So my current plan as I'm making this video is to continue adding to MLX. Now I've been holding it over the past few months. Energy stocks have been a little weird since the Iran war started. And that brings us to the next stock which is Exon Mobile, ticker symbol XOM. Now longtime viewers of the channel know that Exon Mobile has been one of my best investments in terms of returns. I have a 379% total return and it's currently valued at $16.99,000, but I have trimmed that actually over the past couple months. And the main reason was because how well it's been doing in 2026. And it's frankly kind of overvalued, especially if you're someone who thinks in the long run the price of oil will be coming down. And even if it stays at these somewhat elevated levels, it's down still from the peak of the Iran war, but the earnings per share really haven't grown that much. You can see analysts, they're projecting $1123 in fiscal 2026. So they're already pricing in a pretty big jump due to that Iran war increased oil price. And then analysts are expecting that to be higher in the years coming. I'm not sure if that's actually what's going to happen. Exon Mobile and these oil producers, whether it's Chevron or Kico Phillips, they have a slightly different business model than those mid-stream oil and gas stocks I own. These companies are very sensitive to the commodity price of oil. So, you can see that earnings per share go up and down over time. In 2020, the price of oil plummeted. It even went negative briefly. Exon Mobile was losing money. And I used that as an opportunity to buy. I was buying a ton of Exon Mobile at the time. Those of you who were around back then watching these videos, a lot of you bought as well. And I think I can speak for all of us. We all wish we bought more at the time. I wish my portfolio was 75% 90% Exon Mobile. It wasn't, but it did very well. And I held it in the coming years. And I got dividends along that entire time, which helped with total return even more because I was reinvesting those dividends. And Exxon's been a great dividend stock in the long run. They continue to raise it on an annual basis. They're a reliable payer. They survive every single oil downturn because they're conservative with their dividend policy, but because of that, their dividend growth is a little bit slower. The 5-year keer is 3.43%. And now, pretty much any way you look at it based on the dividend yield, the stock is super expensive. A 2.65% dividend yield for a higher payout ratio. Over the past 10 years, this is the most expensive Exon Mobile has ever been based on its dividend. So, because of that, I trimmed the position. Now, if there ever is a crazy oil downturn again, I'll be a net adder probably to Exon Mobile. The company today still pays me $450 in annual dividend income. I think this was closer to $800 before I trimmed it. But you can see the stark difference in the forward-looking dividend yield versus my yield on cost, especially yield on cost plus dividends reinvested. I have a 10.54% dividend yield on cost. And since I bought the stock, the company has paid me $3.5,000 in dividends. and it just recently paid me $180 in June. So, my current plan with this Exxon position is to hold. Definitely not buying at the current prices. If the price gets insane, then maybe I'd even sell more. We'll see. My current plan is to hold and wait for the next kind of oil downturn before I would ever even consider adding. And this is a part of that long-term investing mindset of like that opportunity might not even come in the next 5 years. It might be 10 years from now. But you continue to learn things over time. So the next time you see that opportunity, you recognize the pattern and you can go heavier. This is part of the intuition that you build up over time. But now let's get to that forecast that I mentioned earlier. What this can compound to over the long run on our portfolio tracker on dividend.com. There's a forecast tab and it will prefill with the exact information from your account. You can control the dividend growth assumptions, the price growth assumptions, your monthly contributions. You can even add dividend tax rates, how many years you want to forecast out. You can set a goal for your monthly income, your portfolio value goal. So, you can see my five-year dividend growth based on the stocks that I own in the account is an average of 10%. This is weighted by your income. I'm going to lower this to probably 7%. That's a little more realistic. And I do plan to have a more total return focused account. So, price growth I'll probably keep at 10%. That's kind of in line with what the S&P 500 does. Anyways, contributions I'll keep that set at $2,000. That's probably on average what I would do. Although I'm starting to make more money over time, so it's on the conservative end. And my actual mental plan is to continue just compounding what I invest as well as my income grows. But 2,000 is pretty fair. And then I'm reinvesting dividends in this simulation. So let's set the monthly income goal at $10,000. So when would I be hitting $10,000 a month of dividend income? Let's set the portfolio value goal at $5 million. When would I be expected to hit that? So here we have the projections. You can see it both in a table of the exact years when you would hit the goal, the portfolio value, the dividend income. You can get a bull case, a base case with your monthly contributions, a base case without your monthly contributions, and a bare case. There's also a thing that shows you exactly how those are calculated. If you're interested, pause the video if you want to see it, but I'm not going to say it all. So, first, let's just start with the reality. Over the next 10 years, I'm not hitting any of those goals. And that's because those are long-term goals. With those inputs of that portfolio, those growth rates, and that amount of monthly contributions, you shouldn't expect to hit that kind of goal. But you can see over the long run, the compounding effect starts to take shape. And even in the bare case, which is the scenario where I underperform by 3 percentage points, the dividend growth and the price appreciation each year. And I don't include contributions either. Only the base case plus contributions includes the contributions of $2,000 a month. Even in that scenario, I would still hit that $5 million value goal in year 29. Now, that'd be 2055. Lucky for me, I am going to be alive then, hopefully. Knock on wood. But that goes to show the long-term compounding effect. Again, the bare case, 3%age points lower in each growth rate and no contributions, just the portfolio I've already built up. With contributions, I would hit that income goal of $10,000 a month of dividend income on average by year 19. That would be 2045. So, that's just my current account compounding around what it's been doing recently, investing $2,000 a month on top of that. I'd be hitting that value goal of $5 million that same year in 2045. And when you look at the chart here, you can see how the compounding effect works. Time is the most important variable. By the time you get to year 2050, every year you're gaining more in portfolio value than you even had when you started. This is your money making money for you. And by the end of the 30-year simulation with these estimates, investing $2,000 a month with those base case assumptions, you'd end up with a final portfolio value of $19.81 million, annual dividend income of $414,000, and monthly dividend income of $34.5,000. But it takes time. Investing, it's a long-term game. You can't get caught up in the dayto-day, the week-toeek trading. You have to have your eye on the prize, the long-term compounding. It doesn't even seem like a big difference in year three, year four, and definitely not monthtomonth. But as you start to look, five years at a time, and if you think 10 years at a time, the compounding effect starts to add up. That's why you just need to get the ball rolling. That's the most important part of investing. And you know, you might be starting now and maybe it's a $100 a month and then you can do a 250 and then you can do 500, then you can do a,000, then you can do 2,000 and then maybe 5,000. And that number keeps scaling. It could be 10,000 a month. It could be 20,000 a month. And in the big picture, my dividend investing strategy is to just take my actively earned income, keep my lifestyle and expenses far below my income, so I have a lot of personal cash flow to invest. And in the long run, so 20 years from now, my plan would be for my investments to be making far more money than I make in my active income. And what all of us are doing when we're investing is we're building that compounding machine. And that's through ownership stakes in real businesses. That's what stocks are. You're investing in businesses. Whether you're buying an individual stock or a ETF or index fund, that would be a diversified basket of companies. It's all businesses. And if you want to use the same exact research tool that I do to find better investments and to track my portfolio, it's all available at dividendata.com. I personally built this tool with everything that I want as an investor. It has all of the metrics I care about displayed in the exact same way. It's built for the long-term investor and it has a great focus on dividends for dividend investors. We just put out the next generation version of dividend data.com and the early feedback has been amazing. So, thank you to everyone who supported over the years. And to celebrate the launch, we're doing a founding member sale. You can get 50% off annual membership and you can keep that discounted price every year because we like to reward long-term members. And if the tool helps you stay consistent with your investing strategy, find a few better stocks, make less mistakes, then it way more than pays for itself, like many, many, many times over. So, if you're someone who's investing thousands of dollars a month and you're managing your own investing strategy, check out dividenda.com. It's a great tool. And if you want to support the channel, the best way you can do so is by getting the founding member deal. The link is in the description and pin comment of the video. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next