As my dividend account is small my goal is to maximize income to get as much money out of my invested dollar as possible. Then the question comes, how to achieve it? I know I need to invest in companies providing higher yield to get more money in and reinvest them.

I also understand that by investing into higher yield stocks I am taking bigger risk. A true dividend growth investor would prefer investing into lesser yielding stocks but he wants to have a maximum possible security as far as income from the dividends goes.

Chasing yield can be dangerous, but there are stocks out there which offer security and high yield. There are stocks which are still acceptable such as some REITs (Realty Income O), MLPS (a former KMP now KMI), then stocks such AT&T (T), or now my favorite energy, oil involved stocks such as ConocoPhillips (COP) or Chevron (CVX).

The latter two companies were heavily sold off lately due to investors’ panic and them freaking that oil price war may hurt them if not liquidate them whatsoever. And if you look at the price of Conoco, it is still declining:

Or look at Chevron (CVX) and its decline as investors are dumping the stock:

If investors are dumb enough to sell stocks which pay dividends, both provide great yield (CVX yields 3.90% and COP 4.50%) both have great dividend history and their decline is just temporary. Over the course of 5 or 10 years the stocks will be higher and paying a great dividend as they have been paying for the last 20 years.

So, if you want to dump the stock, go ahead. I will gladly buy it.

Why COP or CVX?

As you may remember, I created a proprietary screener which calculates value for every stock. COP and CVX are now ranking as the most undervalued stocks. See a screenshot of my screener:

As you can see in the table above COP ranks as the most undervalued stock as the screener evaluated my entire watch list and calculated the rank for each stock. I decided to publish the result of the screener every month and invest into those stocks. How?

My stock pick investing strategy

I use two ways to invest into those stocks. My first way is to invest into those stocks by buying them all at once. How can you buy them all? It would be difficult to buy them all if you only have, let’s say. $20,000 dollars to start with. Fortunately, there is Motif investing (which by the way offers $150 promotion if you open an account, but the offer will end soon)which offers an opportunity to build a motif with your favorite stocks and invest in them all at once.

You can invest as little as $250 and buy the entire motif (portfolio), and you can purchase partial shares of each company. It works exactly like investing into a mutual fund. The good thing here is, that you can create your own mutual fund and start investing. That’s what I did here, created a motif “Undervalued Stocks” and invested my own money in it.

My second way, or strategy, is buying high ranking individual stocks from the screener. Every time, I have money available in my ROTH IRA account, I check the screener and buy the highest ranking stock with the highest yield.

Dividend yield or rate?

I recently invested into COP as it is high ranking, high yield stock. I am saving more cash for my next purchase and I was thinking what would be my next purchase? Should I invest again into COP or should I pick the next high yielding and high ranking stock?

Then I saw CVX and what caught my eye was its dividend rate. I noticed CVX is paying $4.28 a share, while COP just $2.92 a share.

Wow, that’s almost twice as much as COP! And I want my portfolio to grow faster so investing into CVX would pay me more money, right? Well, it depends. Sometimes just looking at the numbers only without putting them into perspective can be deceiving.

I was completely decided to make my next purchase into CVX because of the higher rate I can get. But then I used a simple math.

If I invest $1,000 dollars (as is my minimum limit) I would be able to buy 15 shares of COP (at current price of $65.76), but only 9 shares of CVX (at $108.03 a share).

COP then would pay me $43.8 annual dividend, but CVX only $38.52 annual dividend.

I get more money investing into COP with a lower rate for invested dollar. That means, that I will continue investing into COP as long as it stays in my screener as “BUY”.

Well, this small exercise may seem obvious, but the point is that the numbers can be misleading and before investing, always look at them from a different perspective. Don’t invest into any stock just because one number looks better than the other one. It actually may not be.

What do you think? Would you invest into COP or CVX?