{"id":19106,"date":"2011-02-06T10:16:00","date_gmt":"2011-02-06T15:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/countingpips.com\/fx\/?p=19106"},"modified":"2011-02-06T10:16:00","modified_gmt":"2011-02-06T15:16:00","slug":"high-dividend-stocks-why-you-can-still-lose-money-very-easily","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/2011\/02\/06\/high-dividend-stocks-why-you-can-still-lose-money-very-easily\/","title":{"rendered":"High Dividend Stocks &#8211; Why You Can Still Lose Money Very Easily"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>By James Woolley<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Many people automatically assume that investing in dividend stocks is  a guaranteed way of making money, particularly if you invest in those  with high payouts of between 5% and 10%, for example. However this is  not really true at all.<\/p>\n<p>If you are investing for say 10 or 20  years, then you could argue that the timing of your buys is not  necessarily that important. That&#8217;s because by earning say 5% every year  from your dividend stocks, these payments will more than compensate for  any flat or slightly negative share price movement. This is particularly  true if you reinvest the proceeds each year.<\/p>\n<p>However if you don&#8217;t  intend to hold on to these stocks for as long as this, then you need to  place more importance on when you actually buy because it can make a  huge difference. Assuming that a company is likely to continue paying  decent dividends each year, you should ideally invest in these companies  when the share price is temporarily oversold. So for example when  indicators such as the RSI and Stochastics are both in oversold  territory.<\/p>\n<p>The result of this is that you may well have greater  capital gains when you do eventually sell, and you will also earn more  in percentage terms from your dividend payouts. To demonstrate this  point, if the dividend for a stock is fixed at 10p each year, you would  earn 10% per year if you had bought at 100p, 6.66% if you had bought at  150p, and just 5% if you had bought at 200p.<\/p>\n<p>If you have a habit  of buying stocks when they are showing strength, which can often turn  out to be the top of a trend, then you could easily lose money from  these stocks in the long run. There is little point investing for the  sake of receiving good dividends if you keep buying at overinflated  prices because the share price could subsequently fall quite  substantially, negating the effect of the income that you receive each  year.<\/p>\n<p>Another way you can lose money is if you look for  income-generating stocks from amongst the small and mid-cap companies.  While some of these companies offer some very attractive yields, they  are a lot riskier because their futures are a lot less secure than many  of the large-cap stocks. If they run into difficulties, they could  easily reduce the dividend or scrap it altogether.<\/p>\n<p>So the point I  am making is that you are not guaranteed to make money from high  dividend stocks, even if you are investing for the long-term. Yes some  of the big companies should offer some decent returns, but even then  there is a still an element of risk. So this is something that you might  like to bear in mind in the future.<\/p>\n<h3>About the Author<\/h3>\n<p>Click here to read a review of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.stocks-and-options.com\/Stock-Trading-Nitty-Gritty.html\" target=\"_new\">Stock Trading Nitty Gritty<\/a>, the training course that teaches you how to successfully trade individual stocks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Many people automatically assume that investing in dividend stocks is a guaranteed way of making money, particularly if you invest in those with high payouts of between 5% and 10%, for example. However this is not really true at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19106"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19106\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}