April 2015 – Dividend Stocks Watch List

Welcome to the April 2015 edition of the TV Dividend Stocks Watch List. Every month, I go through a list of FTSE 350 value stocks and dividend-paying stocks. I start off with all 350 stocks, and I rank them in different ways in order to whittle down the numbers towards a lower amount by following a set of criteria. This helps me review what is going on in the UK stock market, as I see the ups and downs of every stock’s data. I can then choose stocks that I would like to research more, in order to invest, but first I have to get rid of those that I probably wouldn’t like to invest in. To see how I do this, check out the stock selection criteria we use.

Dividends are one of my strategies for wealth through passive income. I’ve only recently started investing more seriously, after several years as a student. In the intervening years, I mostly used p2p lending as an investing strategy. Now, I’m returning to slowly building up our shares in value and dividend growth stocks as a way of diversifying our income streams, because I believe that certain stocks and markets are cheap right now. Our pensions (M’s SIPP, T’s pensions) do not include individual stocks, and neither does our emergency fund, nor the investment accounts we have opened for our son.

So, which stocks made it into our fourth watch list of the year? You may remember that earlier the year, we lost three FTSE 100 stocks from January to February. As February moved to March, last month lost us another five FTSE 100 stocks. What will April bring us, other than showers, the end of the tax year (groan – but yippee for new NISA allowances) and the beloved longer evenings?

FTSE 100 Dividend Paying Value Stocks

We have managed to increase the amount of stocks from 7 in March to 9 in April. Woohoo! Two extra stocks to consider adding to M’s NISA by doing some further research on them. Here’s the list, and scroll down further for the FTSE 250 list:

As you can see, Diageo is back in! And a totally new addition is Next, because their P/E ratio has dropped significantly enough to be included in my cheap-as-chips i.e. below 20 screening criterion. You’ll also notice that Morrissons Supermarket has been replaced by Capita, yet another stock along the lines of my favourite stock in this sector, Interserve. All the other usual suspects are there e.g. Vodafone, Sky, Sainsbury’s, BAE Systems, and Aberdeen Asset Management. No real surprises there then. And I am happy to say that I own shares each of these stocks. YAY!

FTSE 250 Dividend Paying Value Stocks

Only slightly changed from last month’s list, the FTSE 250 still offers us 24 potential companies to invest in, if we stick to my investing criteria like glue, which we don’t always but usually do.

International Public Partners is a completely new addition, having replaced Victrex from last month’s list. Again, some familiar faces here in the FTSE 250 list of dividend paying value stocks – our good old friend Interserve, recent purchase Beazley, and well-known high street store WH Smiths are all on there as they usually are. Again, the FTSE 250 continues to offer more choices than the FTSE 100.

So, which of these stocks would you buy shares in? Apparently, not all of them, as Dividend Life’s hardcore UK Champions research project shows that there is a lot of misleading data out there that skews the results of screeners which throw up lists such as mine above. Both Stagecoach Holdings and Wood Group both undertook stock splits in 2011, which resulted in their actual adjusted payouts reducing their dividend growth history to two and three years respectively. I am loathe to do this kind of research, so it’s good job DL is already doing a great job of it. Do send him a word of thanks!

Right, so which stocks interest YOU oh reader? Let me know, leave a comment below!

photo credit: bplanet:freedigitalphotos.net