MARK LAMONICA | From Morningstar

· Podcast Episodes
Income Investing, DRiPs and Deciphering Dividends with Mark LaMonica from Morningstar

Mark LaMonica CFA, is an investor, financial educator and the Director of Product Management, Individual Investor at Morningstar. He still recalls the excitement of receiving his first dividend from Nike as a teen. Mark became interested in income investing during the chaotic dot-com crash emphasizing the importance of looking at a company as a real business, rather than a ticker code.

Mark believes in the importance of financial independence and how dividends can be used to generate income without touching principal. We also explore the importance of balancing dividend growth and current yield in an income investing strategy.

And financial theory tells us that it's better for a company to reinvest that money and grow the business. And you know that's true and I completely accept that financial theory tells us that total returns are more important than, obviously, dividends, and we should be focused on total returns. But yeah, in the real world there's just so many examples of management of company doing really dumb things and doing things that are self-serving and doing things that, if you're a CEO, do you want to run a medium-sized company or a huge company. Well, your ego tells you to run a huge company, so it's going out there and buying other companies. Most of that M&A activity does not work. It does not add shareholder value, but it makes you look good, right as the manager of the company. So I think in the real world it is a nice break to have management take a step back and say, ok, I need to do some shareholder friendly things and give them back some money.

EPISODE CHAPTERS WITH SHORT KEY POINTS

(0:00:01) - Dividends and Financial Independence

Mark LaMonica shares his experience of income investing during the dot-com crash, emphasizing the importance of viewing a company as a real business and expectations priced into the market.

(0:09:49) - Financial Independence and Dividend Investing

We discuss financial independence, dividend income, stock market wealth-building, and balancing dividend growth and yield.

(0:14:22) - Understanding Dividend Traps and Income Investing

Investing in high yielding shares discussed, pitfalls of dividend traps, trade-off between reinvesting profits or paying a dividend, example of Warren Buffett.

(0:20:26) - Dividend Investing and Evaluating American Tower

Dividends used to impose discipline, maximize total returns, American Tower stock purchase, current yield, dividend growth, business economics.

(0:29:43) - Dividend Reinvestment Plans and Income Sectors

Mark LaMonica discusses dividend reinvestment plans, real estate investment trusts, and stable income stocks for investors.

TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS AFTER THIS BRIEF MESSAGE

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

0:00:01 - Chloe

Stocks for Beginners. Phil Muscatello and Finpods are authorized reps of Money Sherpa. The information in this podcast is general in nature and doesn't take into account your personal situation.

0:00:12 - Mark

Financial theory tells us that it's better for a company to reinvest that money and grow the business, and you know that's true and I completely accept that. Financial theory tells us that total returns are more important than, obviously, dividends. We should be focused on total returns. But yeah, in the real world there's just so many examples of management of company doing really dumb things.

0:00:37 - Phil

Hi and welcome back to Stocks for Beginners. I'm Phil Muscatello. Do you know the only thing that gives me pleasure, it's to see my dividends coming in. That's a quote from John D Rockefeller. Joining us today to discuss the joy of dividends is Mark Lamonica from Morningstar, a big fan of John D Rockefeller. Hello, Mark.

Hi thank you for having me. Mark is a seasoned income investor with over two decades of experience. Mark's journey into income investing began during the chaotic days of the dot-com crash, which, I have to point out. Mark is getting on for 30 years now. Almost we're not losing track of time by any chance.

0:01:13 - Mark

I know I'm very old, I'm just trying to minimize that.

0:01:17 - Phil

So can you tell us more about that experience and what made you see dividends as a tangible and appealing investment opportunity during that time?

0:01:25 - Mark

Yeah, absolutely so. I think, more than anything else, we're obviously all shaped by our experiences and during that dot-com bubble, I was in college and many Americans and people around the world obviously I was captivated by how well the market was doing and I opened up a brokerage account and started investing and basically at the time I really did what I think a lot of people did and read a couple articles and decided the internet was obviously going to revolutionize everything and that was the place to go, and basically things did not work out very well for me, like many other people. So I chased some of these tech darlings without, in retrospect, knowing at all what I was doing and I think, coming out of that, I was still very interested in investing, but there was so much during that time period that just was not real. So there were companies that didn't have real earnings. There were a lot of scandals involved as well, as we often see at the top of a bubble. We had accounting scandals at Global Crossing and WorldCom, just to name a few of those companies.

And really what I was looking for is, I think, and you said in the question, is something real and tangible and, I think, getting back to the basics of investing and the fact that you are the owner of a business. That business hopefully generates earnings and cash flows, and a dividend is a way to get some of that money back of the company that you own. So it just seemed like something that I could anchor on and I dove into Excel and started modeling a couple of things out and started to think what a great concept this is, that for doing nothing, you are actually getting paid. And I think, just as I started work and as I graduated college and started work and I think, like many people, obviously when you first start out you're not doing the most exciting work in the world I was thinking, ok, how can I get out of this? Is this going to be the next 40 years of my life? And I think kind of the two things came together. And yeah, that was at a very young age when I became interested in income investing.

0:03:40 - Phil

And that's something that many investors never get past is the stories, rather than looking at the stories as looking at the numbers, and rumor has it that you still have an AOL email account, by the way, Exactly, exactly.

0:03:52 - Mark

I am ancient, I can barely make it to work every day.

0:03:57 - Phil

So what would you suggest to someone who is starting out? And of course, they get interested in stories and so many times the news is about the stories. How would you suggest people just start taking that first step at looking at a company as a real business rather than a ticker code?

0:04:12 - Mark

Yeah, I think the first thing is just having self-awareness that we are always going to be attracted to narratives and one of the problems with investing is, of course, the market is forward-looking and it can be a very compelling story and it can in fact be true. But if that's already priced into the market, if those expectations are already priced into the market, there really isn't an opportunity to get a strong return out of that. So what you need is for the expectations and in reality what happens, to be different. So the more hype around something and the better that story sounds, the harder it is for the companies involved in that to actually exceed those expectations.

And I think, going back and a comment I made a couple minutes ago about the dot-com bubble, is the story back then was that the internet would change everything. The internet did change everything, but the problem was that there was such high expectations about number one, I guess, the rate of change and the way that that would be monetized that these companies were all trading at such high levels that even companies like Microsoft and Cisco companies that are very strong companies still even those companies took decades and decades to make up for the losses that they had after that dot-com fall, it wasn't because they were not great companies. It's just because those expectations were so high that they couldn't meet them, and it just took a very long time to shake that out. So I just think it's always important to remember that once you hear this compelling narrative, that is not a piece of information that you've uniquely discovered. That is something that's widely known and it's generally priced into the market.

0:06:02 - Phil

What was the first company that you received a dividend from, and how did it feel?

0:06:08 - Mark

Yeah, it's a good question. So I will say that pre-college I was lucky enough that my parents actually gave me small gifts of shares for my birthday and for Christmas, and so I believe the first company I've ever received a dividend from was Nike. That was just shoes that I liked when I was younger. So you know, I think my parents were going with that old adage of you know, to try to get somebody interested in something, give them shares in the company they're interested in. But when I think about kind of the first dividend investments that I made when I was consciously doing it was at the time since broken up into Philip Morris, which is tobacco share, and you know it's broken up into kind of multiple companies at this point.

But that was probably my first dividend purchase and yeah, I mean, how did it feel? I mean I think it felt good to see something once again kind of tangible coming out of this investment and I reinvested the dividend. It isn't like I spent it, it didn't have any sort of meaningful impact on my life, but yeah, it was just something about kind of seeing that hit the account. That made me think, okay, well, this is something that I can continue to grow, this income stream At some point in my life. Hopefully it will make a difference in my day to day existence.

0:07:29 - Phil

And that's very important for investors to understand, and I believe that dividends do help this knowledge that you are becoming part owner of a company and this is the harvest, the fruits of the company that you're investing in.

0:07:44 - Mark

Yeah, absolutely. I think it just reinforces that. And if we look at financial theory, certainly there is no difference if a company decides to not pay a dividend and pay a dividend. And you know, when we look at a return perspective, ultimately we're looking for those total returns, which are made up of capital gains, of course, and then dividends. But I do think, at least for me, there just was something different about actually getting that dividend and it just reinforced everything that we want to reinforce as investors that we're in this for the long term, that we are buying a real company. This is not a piece of paper that's being traded. It is a real, tangible company that is creating goods and services, selling those and making a profit, hopefully. So for me, it just really grounded me in what those foundations of investing are, which I do think has helped me in a lot of ways.

0:08:40 - Phil

Dividend income can help to contribute to financial independence. So what role can dividends play in terms of providing financial independence for people, hopefully before retirement?

0:08:52 - Mark

Yeah, no, it's a great question and you know, financial independence is a driver, I think, of a lot of investing and why people do invest, and it is important to acknowledge that financial independence does mean very different things to different people, and to me, more than anything, it is sort of independence from your nine to five job, and you know, I think that that can actually manifest in a lot of different ways. It can be obviously just sort of mentally understanding that you have the ability to walk out if you want to, if a situation comes up where you think you need to, and I think that a lot of people take a lot of comfort in that.

Take this job and shove it approach Well, exactly, and knowing that you can do that even if you never do right. And then I think you know a lot of people. Perhaps it's pursuing a different career which maybe, at least in the beginning, is not paying as well, and it's potentially working part-time. So there's all sorts of things that I think financial independence means, but all of it is as you said in the question. All of it is having a pool of money that you can access prior to retirement. We all need to take care of retirement and that's something that is a common investing goal. But it's also building up something that can be spent before retirement.

And the problem that you run into, of course, is how do you actually access that money? And obviously you can sell off your investments and then you get into all sorts of different things around. Okay, how much can you take out every year? What's the withdrawal rate? Are you gonna run out of money?

But one of the attractive things to me about dividends is if you are living off of your dividends or if you're taking those dividend payments and spending them on something. In theory, you're never going to run out of money because you're not selling off any of your principal, so the actual shares that you own that are generating those dividends. Now there's a lot of things we need to be careful about in terms of dividends getting cut or eliminated, but if you have a well-diversified portfolio, lots of different streams of income in there, then hopefully that's a situation where you can continue to grow that income stream even as you're accessing it. It will lower your overall total returns because you're taking those dividends out, but it's still an opportunity then to generate some income, to give you some independence, whatever that means for you.

0:11:14 - Phil

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Seven Investing long-term thinking without the mental anguish. I'm just thinking about a friend of mine who has recently retired at 58. And a lot of it was that he was building up his dividends and reinvesting dividends for a long period of time. But it actually involved a bit of sacrifice as well, because he was paying tax on those dividends while still keeping them within the cycle of letting them build up. So it's another simple thing sometimes to do it and can involve a bit of sacrifice, can't it? Yeah, it's a good thing. It's a good thing to do. It's a good thing to do. It can involve a bit of sacrifice, can't it?

0:12:31 - Mark

Yeah, and it is a problem. So, you know, in many countries, obviously including the US, there are tax advantages to save for retirement. So whether you're doing that in an IRA or a Roth IRA, 401k, roth 401K, obviously the taxes are a little bit different, but all of them offer a tax advantage. The issue, of course, with building up money that is outside of those tax-advantaged accounts is, of course, that you don't get that advantage, and so one of the problems with dividends, of course, is, even if you reinvest them, as your friend experienced, you still have to pay that tax, and so, obviously, if you're reinvesting all your dividends, you need to come up with those cash payments some other way. So there certainly is a sacrifice involved, and you know tax is something that's really important for everyone to think about, and you know what I would say is and kind of my own experience is, maybe it's not something you think about when you're starting out, and you know your dividend.

Hopefully, your income stream is growing very quickly and there's sort of some reasons for that. Mathematically it's growing very quickly. The taxes actually aren't that high, so you can cover them just out of your paycheck. Well, it becomes a problem as that income builds up more and more and more, and you know you've got a couple of different options there. There's obviously one where you can sacrifice even more of your paycheck to pay off this dividend tax as you own. Or, of course, you can start taking some money out of your brokerage account to pay them off, which of course, slows your dividend growth because you're not reinvesting as much. So it is something important to think about.

0:14:10 - Phil

Balancing dividend growth and current yield is a key step in your income investing strategy. Can you explain how that works, choosing between the higher current yield and shares with longer-term dividend growth potential?

0:14:22 - Mark

Yeah, I think the problem that a lot of investors run into is they decide that and for a lot of people this honestly happens later in life. You know me doing this as a 21-year-old was unusual. A lot of people kind of go for the home run shares and go for the growth shares. They probably don't pay a dividend. But the problems is people decide, ok, I'm an income investor now or I want to earn more income. They'll run a screen, see the shares that pay the highest yield and just invest in those and, without thinking about it, that makes a little bit of logical sense.

But the problem you run into and maybe we can talk about dividend traps later but the problem you run into is that dividends are obviously paid out of earnings that a company generates, and companies have lots of different options for those earnings. One is obviously to pay a dividend. They could buy back shares, but also they could reinvest in the business, and what you want if you are investing for income over the long term is you need the business to keep growing. You need those earnings to keep growing so that they can, of course, pay out dividends, and so the problem is, if they're paying out a very high percentage of their earnings, there's less to reinvest in the company.

And often it's also a signal from the management of the company that they don't have anything better to do with the money. And that can be a problem as well, because they are acknowledging that there is not growth opportunities. So they might as well give it back to the shareholders, and that can be a very smart thing for them to do, but it's also a signal that you're probably not going to get that growth going forward. And I think it's all about a balance. And I think what you want is obviously and we talk about diversification all the time with investing, but we want to take a little bit of a different lens on it with an income investing strategy is that what we're really trying to diversify is those sources of income and we're trying to diversify between the industries, the countries we invest in, where that income is coming from, but we also want to diversify between higher yielding shares and then shares where there's hopefully a longer runway for growth.

0:16:35 - Phil

So maybe it is a good time to talk about dividend traps, because you can end up in the trap that all you're looking for is the dividends, and then the dividends disappear and of course the price of the stock falls as well, and so you get the double whammy.

0:16:47 - Mark

Yeah, exactly, and that happens once again if we go back to the scenario where we are screening for yield. So we're saying, ok, these are the highest yielding shares, I should just invest in them because I want income. Well, one of the problems is that, of course, the yield on a share has to do with the dividend. It also has to do with the price, so a easy way for a company to be a high yielding share is for the price to fall significantly, and so if you don't do your homework, you could see that, as I said before, that investors are anticipating the future, that they've already anticipated.

This dividend is going to be cut, and I'll use a very simple example. But the share has always been trading at a 5% yield. It's always been around there, and all of a sudden it goes up to a 10% yield. Well, that could make you think this is a great bargain. So all of a sudden, I can go out there and get this underpriced share because it's trading at a 10% yield. Well, maybe all of the investors have sat there and figured out that this company is going to cut its dividend by 50%, and so they're just reacting to that future scenario. So that's really why you want to avoid those dividend traps and, like anything else in investing, all it means is doing research and doing your homework and not just sitting there and buying things off of these metrics without understanding them, because every financial ratio around a company could be good, could be bad. You need to understand why it is where it is in order to actually go out there and use that as a signal to buy something.

0:18:20 - Phil

It's worth keeping in mind as well that a dividend yield, when you look at it on, say, Yahoo Finance or whatever, is a backward-looking metric, isn't it?

0:18:29 - Mark

Exactly, and you know dividends this is not an interest payment on a bond. An interest payment on a bond is well, it's not guaranteed because obviously the issuer of the bond can default, but that's a contractual obligation that they have to pay that to you unless they are unable to, which means they're going bankrupt. And a dividend is a choice, and it's a choice. Obviously it's just a choice by management if they want to do it. It is based on if the company makes enough money where they think they can pay that dividend. So there's all sorts of factors that go into that and so just because a company paid a dollar last quarter does not mean that they will or can pay a dollar next quarter. So yeah, all that dividend information and all the financial information we have about companies is in the past. We're just trying to use that past to try to figure out what's going to happen in the future.

0:19:20 - Phil

Because there's many companies and Warren Buffett's a great fan of this as well as they would rather reinvest their capital into activities that are earning more money. So it is a bit of a trade-off, isn't it, that the companies can decide to pay a dividend unless they feel that they can actually earn more money by using that on behalf of shareholders. Is that sort of a good summary, yeah?

0:19:44 - Mark

absolutely, and I always think the Buffett, the Buffett example, is always interesting. So, as you said, you know he certainly feels like he can do a better job investing that money either in one of the wholly owned businesses they own or going out there and building up his portfolio. And if you're Warren Buffett, then absolutely like I agree. But interestingly enough, a lot of the company he invests in whether he buys the whole company or whether he's buying just shares of that company are either dividend payers or companies that generate huge amounts of cash. So it is interesting that he is saying that I'm Warren Buffett, I'm not going to do this, but when he goes out there and invest, those are the companies he's looking for. I always think that's interesting.

But one important thing to remember is that, well, in theory, when we sit here and we say, ok, yes, a company should reinvest in the company, you're also assuming that management makes good decisions with that money.

And most, most is maybe a little bit too aggressive, but a lot of companies make really poor decisions with what they do. They go out there and they buy companies that turn out to be horrible deals later on. They go out there and they buy corporate jets and they pay management a ton of money and they do all these non-shareholder friendly things. They build a nice office, they it's all this empire building. And so one of the reasons why I also like dividends and companies that are committed to dividends is because it does impose a little bit of discipline on that management, that before I go out there and buy my six Gulfstream jet, I need to make sure that I am meeting this dividend, because it's going to dividend paying companies are obviously going to attract investors who are interested in dividends, who do not want that dividend cut. Management will know that they don't want the share price to go down, so it just imposes that discipline on them.

0:21:36 - Phil

That's interesting, isn't it, that it is almost a signal sometimes that they are going to take shareholder interests much more into account than if they were just had free rein with the capital themselves.

0:21:48 - Mark

Oh, you know absolutely, and I think it's where kind of financial theory hits the real world. And financial theory tells us that it's better for a company to reinvest that money and grow the business. And you know that's true and I completely accept that financial theory tells us that total returns are more important than, obviously, dividends, and we should be focused on total returns. But yeah, in the real world there's just so many examples of management of company doing really dumb things and doing things that are self-serving and doing things that, if you're a CEO, do you want to run a medium-sized company or a huge company. Well, your ego tells you to run a huge company, so it's going out there and buying other companies. Most of that M&A activity does not work. It does not add shareholder value, but it makes you look good, right as the manager of the company. So I think in the real world it is a nice break to have management take a step back and say, ok, I need to do some shareholder friendly things and give them back some money.

0:22:51 - Phil

So let's discuss one of your recent purchases American Tower. It has a relatively low current yield but a strong history of dividend growth. What are the factors you'd considered in this purchase?

0:23:03 - Mark

Yeah, american Tower is an interesting one, so it's something that I have. It's a company I've been looking at and sort of wanting for a very long time. It has generally been what we at Morningstar would consider overpriced and from just me looking at it overpriced and it has come back a little bit and, as you mentioned and I'll talk a little bit about the business in a second but from a dividend perspective, it's yielding around 3.3% right now and that is not a huge yield, but it is a lot higher than the five year average, which is around 2%. So to me that was a signal that, compared to the history of this company, it's potentially undervalued. So that was kind of the first thing I looked at. But, as I said before, you need to look beyond a simple ratio like that and actually look at the company. And so, as you said, the company does have a really, really strong track history of paying dividend. So since 2013, they've grown their dividend by an average of 20% a year, which is obviously pretty remarkable, and I do think that that's a good signaling mechanism that management is serious about dividend growth. And that's kind of the first box we want to check, because this is a choice, of course, by management, but obviously in order to enable a dividend to grow that quickly, we need to look at the actual company. The company needs to grow, they need to grow earnings and cash flow in order to grow that dividend. So that's really where I dove in and just a very brief summary about the company.

It's a company that owns cell phone towers and so basically they own the tower, they lease that tower to one or multiple cell phone companies and of course, those companies use those to support their customers and they've started out in the US you can probably figure out by the name American Tower and the economics of the business are pretty great. So we believe the company has a moat or sustainable competitive advantage, and really a lot of that is because once you have a tower and you start adding new customers to that tower so multiple cell phone providers the economics become really really attractive and the returns they're earning on the investment in that tower are really really attractive. And obviously, as first cell phone adoption grew and then obviously as data is becoming such a big part and for many people the primary reason that they have a cell phone, that mobile data growth has really helped the company and that's been great. But the US, which is their core market, has really become saturated and it's not necessarily a terrible thing for them because they'll still generate a lot of cash off of those towers that they have. But you're really not going to see that growth in the US. And they will get some growth by obviously raising the rents that they are charging, the leasing fees that they're charging to the cell phone towers. They've got inflation protection in a lot of those leases. So there are some positive things, but we really need growth to support something like 20% growth and dividends.

And really what they've done is they've turned overseas and they've looked at different markets, so particularly Africa and Latin America, and they're trying to basically do the exact same thing that they did in the US. And if they can, then obviously I think particularly in Africa, a very, very under-penetrated market where there is a lot of room for growth. That obviously introduces business risk. But if they can do the same thing, I think it could be very attractive going forward. And they've gotten to a point now where about 50% of their revenue actually comes from outside the US, so it is a meaningful amount. The question is obviously can they replicate that growth that they saw in the US in some of those markets, but I think at least our analysts thinks that they can, thinks it's attractive, and that's really what got me into this share that I've been looking to purchase for a long time.

0:27:21 - Phil

The stock market is a wealth-building machine. Over long periods of time, stocks have consistently outperformed any other investment option. But how do you cope with the stress, the noise and the emotional turmoil that hits you hard every day? Seven Investing knows the importance of being in the market for the long term. Seven Investing offers seven stock recommendations a month. These are their best ideas, which are actionable buys in the stock market. They're also a fun bunch of people.

Seven Investing are pleased to offer listeners of this podcast a free trial for a week and 33% off the annual price If you sign up using the promo code stocks for beginners. Believe me, this is solid research from experienced advisors who live and breathe the markets. Seven Investing long-term thinking without the mental anguish. Past performance is not a guarantee of future returns. I receive a small commission for services I recommend and I only recommend services I use myself Presumably as well. Part of the moat is that once you've got a mobile phone tower, due to the regulations around where they're placed and community concerns and how much planning that's involved to do it, would discouraged competitors coming into that market, I would assume.

0:28:30 - Mark

Yeah, absolutely, and one of the interesting things is around switching costs, and basically switching costs is a part of a moat where if it's very difficult for a consumer or a company to switch providers, they won't do it.

And one of the interesting things is, once you have so they have a tower, obviously the cell phone company comes in, puts their equipment on that tower. Once they've done that, to move it to another tower is multiples of the yearly rent that they pay, and so it's a very unattractive proposition for a company and it's going to cost you three years of rent literally just to take your equipment from one tower, even if somebody else builds one right next door. Nobody's going to do that, or very few people do that, and there's very little you can do to incentivize them to do that. So and we can even think about this in terms of our own mobile phones If I was trying to switch providers and it cost me three times the amount I pay per year for my plan, I'm probably not going to do it. So I think, because they have so much market share, that just protects the market share, which is good, allows them to generate cash in the US that they can invest internationally and then hopefully grow more.

0:29:43 - Phil

How do investors set up dividend reinvestment plans?

0:29:46 - Mark

Yeah, I mean it varies, I guess, by broker that you use. Personally I use TD Ameritrade, which is now Schwab, and I just send a message basically saying I want to set up a dividend reinvestment on the following shares. So yeah, it's very easy, at least with them. But yeah, you do it through your brokerage. It's not difficult. I assume it might be a little bit different from a procedure standpoint but yeah, just not difficult to do.

0:30:13 - Phil

Are there any particular sectors or industries that you find attractive for income investing at the moment?

0:30:18 - Mark

Yeah. So first off, I will say that obviously at Morningstar we cover a lot of different shares and if we look at the US market right now, we think that it is fairly valued. So basically, our analysts come up with fair value estimates for individual companies that they cover and then we look at the price and see how that compares. So the market overall is fairly valued. From a sector perspective, there are some places that we think are slightly undervalued. One is actually real estate, so real estate investment trust.

Now, there's a lot of reasons why real estate isn't that attractive right now. Obviously, with interest rates going up, that is a problem. So a lot of these companies do borrow a lot of money. Obviously, to build a building or to buy a building does cost a lot of money, so investors aren't really happy about that. The other issue that they've run into, particularly in the office space, that, as companies have been reducing their footprint, that has certainly made it very difficult to be a landlord if you are investing in the office space. And then, finally, just interest rates affect valuation levels of real estate. So some building you own is probably worth less now and we've certainly seen that in some of the sales that have gone through. So there are certainly a lot of issues, but traditionally real estate investment trust and actually by law they have to pay out 90% of their earnings. So traditionally that is a place where you can go and potentially find dividends, just being very wary of the environment we're in and trying to find the right company.

I guess, from my own perspective and maybe not particularly with how the market's doing right now, really what I've looked for and the companies that I'm comfortable with are companies that are less cyclical, and cyclicality refers to how changes in economic conditions affect that company's earnings.

So companies can be highly cyclical if they're going up and down across the economic cycles that we go through. But I've really looked for things that are not cyclical and, as an income investor, what I'm looking for is companies that are not going to see huge hits to their earnings, because of course that could number one, it could put their dividend in danger and number two, it means that they are probably less likely to want to aggressively raise that dividend when they know that the next economic downturn is probably going to hit their earnings. So I've always tended to go into more infrastructure companies, consumer defensive companies, things like that I've always been more interested in and I think that's sort of number one. Maybe I obviously walk through kind of a strategic reason why I think it's good for dividend paying, but also just from a temperament standpoint it makes me more uncomfortable. So those are just the companies that I found attractive.

0:33:09 - Phil

Mark, please tell listeners where they can find out more about dividend stocks using Morningstar.

0:33:15 - Mark

Yeah, absolutely so. Despite my accent, I'm actually I am American. I am living in Australia right now, so if anyone wants to visit our website in Australia, Morningstarcomau, you can go on to there, and then with a colleague I have a podcast called Investing Compass and we talk about income shares frequently, so you can find that on any podcast provider.

0:33:36 - Phil

Mark LaMonica, thank you very much for joining me today.

0:33:38 - Chloe

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