16 companies matchUpdated with our data, free, no account

Dividend powerhouses

Yields above 3%, filtered for the one thing yield screens never check: whether the company can actually afford it.

Figure

Dividend yield across the top 12 matches

Look at the spread, not the ranking. If the bars are all the same length, the screen is arbitrary: one point of dividend yield separates a company that made the list from one that did not, and the cut is doing more work than the data supports. A long tail means the top few are genuinely exceptional and the rest merely qualified.

Figure

What this screen is really buying

Energy

Healthcare

Financials

Consumer

Materials

Communications

The matches are spread across sectors, which means the screen is selecting on the characteristic it claims to and not accidentally on an industry.

Company	Price	P/E	Yield	Moat	Rating
BATS.L British American Tobacco	£31.20	9.0	8.0%	72	66
RIO.L Rio Tinto	£48.20	9.0	6.2%	60	63
MRK Merck & Co.	$82.00	17.0	3.5%	75	66
HSBA.L HSBC Holdings	£7.10	8.5	5.8%	66	66
SBK.JO Standard Bank Group	R236.00	9.5	5.2%	68	67
PFE Pfizer Inc.	$28.30	11.0	5.9%	60	61
FSR.JO FirstRand	R78.40	11.0	4.5%	72	68
ULVR.L Unilever	£46.00	20.0	3.2%	83	69
BP.L BP plc	£3.90	11.0	5.2%	58	59
GSK.L GSK plc	£14.60	9.5	4.0%	71	68
VOD.L Vodafone Group	£0.72	11.0	5.5%	55	55
JNJ Johnson & Johnson	$146.20	14.7	3.4%	76	70
SOL.JO Sasol	R114.00	6.0	4.8%	48	52
CVX Chevron Corp.	$155.00	15.0	4.3%	64	64
SHEL.L Shell plc	£29.10	9.2	4.1%	63	64
XOM Exxon Mobil	$113.40	13.9	3.3%	62	64

Educational information, not financial advice, and not a recommendation to buy anything. A screen is a place to start reading, never a place to stop.

Why this screen works

Yield is the dividend divided by the price. Note the denominator: it rises when the price falls, which means the highest yields on any screen belong, almost by construction, to the companies in the most trouble.

So the screen is not 'find the biggest yield'. It is 'find a good yield attached to a company that can pay it'.

The exact screen

Dividend yield of 3% or more.
Debt to equity below 1.5, because a dividend funded by borrowing is a company liquidating itself politely.
Profit margin above zero, because you cannot pay a dividend out of a loss forever.

Companies where we hold too little data to judge are excluded rather than quietly ranked.

When this screen is wrong

A high yield is the market's opinion that the dividend will be cut. Sometimes the market is wrong. Usually it is not.
This screen cannot see the payout ratio against free cash flow, which is the check that actually matters. Do it yourself on the company page before you buy.
Outside a tax wrapper, dividends are taxed on receipt whether you wanted the cash or not. The yield you see is not the yield you keep.

Understand it properly

Dividend yield Tutorial: avoid a dividend trap Payout ratio Dividend cover