Fall has slipped in without an announcement;

well, actually, it rained yesterday, so perhaps it was announced. It's been 2+ months since the last time I visited. Earnings season came and went. I took a trip overseas to Africa. The "correction" has corrected. Earnings season was a mixed bag.  Nothing too dramatic. Some did better than expected, some not so... dividend growth occurred, but subdued.  I ditched two holdings this year due to slowing business growth. Sysco, after 3 years of minimal dividend growth, and Waste Management. 
Silly me, Waste Management is up 50% this year!  On the other hand, Sysco has barely moved in either valuation or dividend payment.
I'm still holding LNCO, in spite of ongoing controversy. Perhaps I should have sold at first warning, but I think I'll let it play out.

My new 401k/roth401k combo received it's full yearly distribution and I bought a suite of smaller cap DGI candidates. Thus far they're doing ok as a group.  As predicted, my DGI porfolio is lagging the S&P 500 in the run-up, but will surely hold up better in a down-year. I like less volatility. I like the rising dividends. I like the diversity in the portfolio. I like that fact that dividends in the IRA portion of the portfolio have reached the point where they are equal to the new money I am allowed to invest under the law.

My newest idea is to weight the portfolio for dividend payment. That means that companies with lower dividends (presumably faster growing earnings and dividends) would be held at higher capitalization levels than the higher dividend paying kind. That would slant the holdings a bit towards dividend growth and capital gains than towards income alone. That might render a porfolio that performs better from a total yield standpoint. Rather than re-balancing by selling shares of some higher dividend producing stocks, I think I'd just try to buy more of those that have the smaller dividend but higher dividend growth.

The big task for the next interval is to get all my holdings into a spread-sheet that tracks earnings growth, dividend growth and dividend production, as well as total yield with dividends re-invested. If I can do that, I have the whole thing captured. I think I'm ready to start running the portfolio based on metrics, rather than using the analysis of others to guide me. I'll have to decide whether to hire someone to build the spread-sheet I want, or try to develop it myself...

Nothing has fundamentally changed about my approach since I last penned a note. I'm becoming more comfortable jettisoning the high yield side of the portfolio, as it appears to be where all the business risk lies. Next time there's cash, I'll be sniffing around the Canadian banking sector, the small cap consumer staples and manufacturing sectors.
Earnings growth, minimum dividend threshold, dividends growth, goods and services people need in good times and bad....seems like a formula that can work over the long haul.