Welcome to Industry Focus, the podcast that dives into a different sector of the stock market every day.

It's Monday, April 30th, this is the Financial Show, and we are taking a break from some of our usual coverage to talk about dividend

yield traps. I'm your host Michael I'm joined by Matt Frankel. Matt great to have

you back.

Always good to be here.

Fantastic. So folks think of this as a bit of a follow-up from Vince Shen's Consumer

Goods show last Tuesday April 24th. It was a great episode where he and

Motley Fool dot com contributor Osset Sharma talked through stock screening tools

and how they can help you source new stock

ideas.

If you haven't listened to it, I highly recommend it.

It was really thoughtful, really informative, a lot of good action-oriented stuff that you can do right from it. Really just a great

set of resources for investors and I thought they did a great job of really just kind of

putting that all together. So one of the first things that I see plenty of people do when they start screening for stocks or funds is to look for high dividend yields and it kind of makes sense in theory right, you know, dividend is this income that theoretically, hopefully, you can sort of count on and so that makes

that that does a lot to sort of a lot of new investors kind of like immediately looking for that sort of thing.

Sure I mean all things being equal of course you want a higher dividend yield.

Just to give you a personal example when I was kind of trying to decide between AT&T and

Verizon for an investment the fact that AT&T and Verizon for an investment.

The fact that AT&T had a higher yield when pretty much the rest of the business I valued the

same way, give or take, played a big role in my decision to choose AT&T over Verizon for my own portfolio.

So just all things being equal, higher dividend yields are obviously better.

You want dividends to compound over time, a higher starting payment will allow you to

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