Another one bites the dust

Perhaps I'm doomed to experience melt-downs. Perhaps I should stick to large-cap multi-national conglomerates. The pundits are everywhere, telling everyone how they saw it coming, warned us all, etc.

LinnCo took a dive; first by negative press, then by a knock on the door by the feds. No-one has found any wrong-doing, but the mere inference that they may have incorrectly booked the cost of their hedging strategy has punished the stock and it's holders. Many have run for the exits. Others refuse to budge. Critics say the company won't recover until the feds leave the building.

If I stick to my dividend guns, I won't run until the dividend is cut or frozen, or the business model is proven to be faulty. One critic called it a Ponzi scheme. Funny, he never said that before Barron's came out with a critical article. I hate the post-hoc prophets. They feel the need to cover their egos with "I told you so" messages. I'm sticking, because the 40% dive has already occurred, before I understood the nature of the complaint. I can lock in the losses, or simply collect the dividend and see what happens.

My security is that LinnCo is 2% of my holdings. So, I'm down 0.8% as a result. It's not much of a hit in the big picture. I'll be disappointed if other MLPs go a similar way, but the others that I hold are huge pipeline MLPs and they don't have the same exposure to fluctuations in the price of oil and gas, therefore they don't need a hedge strategy, therefore they don't have this kind of opacity in their books. My issue is there are many things I don't know about accounting, so I'm vulnerable to any kind of event like this.  Thus, the 50+ stocks in the portfolio.

What about the rest? We've had a 5% correction, thereabouts. It doesn't look like it's headed much lower. Earning season is sneaking up on us again. I'm pretty much fully invested, so there's not much to do but either go gardening or watch for news. I'm sticking to my DGI strategy, checking valuations, dividend updates and learning those new graphs on my FastGraph's subscription.

I think I'll let some subscriptions expire. Newsletter editors have changed and I am no longer in need of the guidance from most of them. There's vague unease in the air, but it's about whether we've run too far too fast, not whether the world is coming to an end, so one can be thankful for the lack of drama in the angst.  I'm pretty secure in the new orthodoxy of watching the dividend stream as the primary indicator of health of the portfolio. If my DRIPs are resulting in me buying some stocks at premium valuations, it's a misdemeaner, not a felony. Since I don't really want to keep growing the number of companies in the portfolio, I'd prefer to just let each issue grow as it can. I'm not motivated to selectively purchase the one with the lowest PE and the highest dividend yield.

I'm looking for small cap dividend growth companies for the new 401k. I'd like to move down the capitation curve and see if I can pick up some additional growth even in the face of 3+% dividends.
My large-cap multi-national credentials are pretty solid now, so I can afford to look a little further into the field for smaller companies that have good DGI credentials and bigger growth opportunities.

Happy hunting...