Ultimate Stock Pickers: Top 10 Dividend Stocks

Earlier this year, the Ultimate Stock-Pickers team put together an article highlighting some of the better-yielding stocks that our top managers held coming into 2011. Since that time, unrest in the Middle East, natural (and not so natural) disasters in the Asia-Pacific region, an ongoing European debt crisis, a falling U.S. housing market, a pathetic showing for domestic job creation, and the impending end of QE2 have all had an impact on the markets. While the S&P 500 Index (SPX) had held up well through much of this turmoil, rising 6% during the first quarter (and another 3% in April), it has given back almost all of those gains during the last six weeks, with the benchmark up less than 2% for the year at the end of last week. The roller coaster of market returns that we have seen so far this year has many investors yearning for returns that cannot be taken away so readily--that is to say, dividends.