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This post is going to look at some of the highest dividend paying stocks at this point in time. There are a few reasons that I have decided to look into this. First of all, my dad always suggests stocks to me because of the dividends that they pay. “You should get WXYY. They have a 4% dividend, which is much higher than you can get in a CD.” Of course just because a stock pays a dividend doesn’t mean that it is going to rise. Second, father was on the WAMU bandwagon, especially when they were paying 10%+. Look at that company now.

There is a big reason that I am skeptical of companies with high dividends. Back in 2006 I bought a little bit of stock in a company called Fieldstone Investment Corporation. They were one of those REIT companies that ended up collapsing. Anyway I initially got into the company in 2006 thinking that it might make a good play, especially with such a high dividend. At the time I think it was paying at least 15%.

As you can see from the image above, my experience with them did not go entirely according to plans. All in all I spend $1177.40 on the stock, and ended up selling for $610.03 over a course of less than a year. This was coming from a company with a 15% dividend. Who would have thought? All in all I made $98.70 in dividends from them. That makes my sell price look a bit better, but definitely a far cry from perfect.

When choosing companies to look at, I am not going to look at the companies that pay the most out per share, but I am actually going to look for the companies that have the highest dividend yield. By clicking on the thumbnail, you can see the companies with the highest dividend rates that traded for at least $10.

I did another chart where I looked at companies that were trading for at least $25 and were paying at least 10%. Here are the top 15. Click the thumbnail to see who made the cut.

So the goal for this experiment is to see whether or not these stocks beat the market, and maintain their dividend yield. My prediction is that either the dividends will be cut, or the price of each stock will drop. I think the reason that these rates are so high is that the stock has dropped quite a bit since the last dividend was paid. Since we have no idea what the next dividend will be, we have to go by what the most recent one said. I think that this produced abnormal yields.