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Welcome to Investing Insights. I'm your host, Ivana Hampton. Does dividend investing create bad investor behavior? This strategy can split investors into two camps, those in favor and those against.

Here's how it works. A company will pay out part of its earnings to stock owners, typically quarterly.

Those dividends can arrive as a check in the mail or cash in a brokerage account. Critics say

this isn't a bonus, but a cut into the total return.

But income-focused investors don't seem to mind.

David Harrell is the editor of Morningstar's Dividend Investor newsletter.

We talked about the psychology of dividends.

Welcome back to the podcast, David.

Thanks for having you back.

Let's start with why dividend investing has divided so many investors.

Well, I'm not sure if investors are divided, you know, as an editor of a dividend-oriented

newsletter.

Certainly I hear from investors that are very pro-dividend investing.

But I think if investors are divided or maybe sometimes confused, it's because

they're getting mixed messages about dividends. So if you read the, you know, sort of financial

headlines, you see the news. Like earlier this year, I think we spoke about, you had some big

name companies initiating dividends for the first time, meta-platforms and alphabet.

And in often cases, that was praised as a good thing.

You see headlines about dividend increases, and that's generally viewed as positive.

There's this whole idea of dividend growth investing by identifying companies that are growing

their dividends at a regular pace.

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