Please stay tuned for important disclosure information at the conclusion of this episode.

Hello and welcome to a special post- Thanksgiving episode of the Morning Filter podcast.

I'm Susan Chivinsky with Morningstar.

Today I'm sitting down with Morningstar Index's strategist Dan Lefkowitz to discuss dividend stocks. Dan is a columnist from

Morningstar.com and co-host of another Morningstar podcast called The Longview. During our conversation,

Dan and I will cover how and why dividend stocks have performed the way they have this year,

what the stock buyback boom means for dividend stock investors, how to spot a dividend that's unsafe, and more. We're having this conversation on Wednesday, November 19th. Well, Dan, thanks for joining me today on the morning filter. I was good to be with you, Susan. Now, I'm usually doing this Monday mornings from my home office with coffee, so I have the coffee, even though it's not Monday

morning for my home office. I'll try to keep you awake. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Okay, so Dan, you know, dividend investing isn't necessarily your specialty, but you know,

it's a topic that you go back to time and time again as a columnist. Why is that?

Yeah, I think bottom line, dividends are really important to investors.

By my count, there's over $1 trillion in funds and ETFs that screened for dividends

or dividend weighted on a global basis.

And over the years, our team at Morning Start indexes has developed a lot of different dividend

weighted dividend screened indexes from high-yielding equities to

dividend growth to combining dividend and buybacks. And I happen to think that dividend investing is

just a good way to participate in the equity market, not just for income, but also for total return.

All right. We're going to unpack a large part of that today. So glad you're with us.

So let's start out with a little bit of an update for our audience on the performance of dividend

stocks so far in 2025. How have they held up compared to, say, the broad U.S. stock market?

Yeah. So as of today, most of our dividend indexes have done well in absolute terms, but they've lagged the overall

U.S. equity market, not by a massive margin, but by a few percentage points.

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