The Dividend Hunter Review

Introduction

The Dividend Hunter is a stock recommendation newsletter from Investors Alley focused on helping you build a diversified portfolio of high-paying dividend stocks. It’s written by Tim Plaehn, a former stock broker and analyst who also edits the Weekly Income Accelerator and Monthly Dividend Multiplier newsletters.

Holdings in The Dividend Hunter portfolio have an average dividend yield of over 8% as of September 2023. Keep reading out The Dividend Hunter review to find out if this newsletter is right for you.

The Dividend Hunter Pricing Options

The Dividend Hunter costs $49 per quarter. After signing up, we received an offer to upgrade to a lifetime subscription for $297. The lifetime subscription comes with a one-year money-back guarantee.

Note that when you sign up for The Dividend Hunter, you’re also enrolled in a subscription for Investors Alley’s Divcaster tool. This is free for the first 60 days, but then auto-renews at $99 per year.

The Dividend Hunter Investment Style

The Dividend Hunter is a monthly newsletter focused on high-payout dividend stocks. As of September 2023, the average yield of holdings in the portfolio is over 8%. The lowest-yielding stock pays out 5.9%.

The newsletter isn’t only focused on stocks. It also includes REITs, ETFs, ETNs, and bonds. Recommendations are divided into three categories:

• Stable dividend investments
• Variable dividend investments
• Fixed-income dividend investments

This can be helpful because investors can diversify their portfolio based on the predicted stability of income. Retirement investors can focus more on fixed-income dividend investments, for example, while more aggressive investors can chase yield above 10% among holdings in the variable dividend investments category.

The portfolio typically contains 30-40 holdings at any given time.

Monthly Newsletter

The Dividend Hunter’s monthly newsletter offers one to two new dividend investment recommendations and an update on the portfolio. If there are any sell alerts, they’ll be included in the monthly newsletter.

The newsletter is usually a 10-15 minute read, and it’s fairly approachable for beginner investors. Plaehn gives a broad picture of each company’s business and why he thinks it’s a good investment. If there are questions about the sustainability of a company’s dividend, he’ll usually discuss that in detail.

The newsletter isn’t exceptionally well-organized, so you have to read the whole thing to understand what holdings are being recommended. Plaehn mixes discussion of new recommendations with recaps about holdings already in the portfolio, so it can get a little confusing. He also sometimes discusses aspects of his investment strategy, such as why he recommends ETNs or REITs on occasion.

Unfortunately, there’s no simple set of bullet points or a table that shows what to add to your portfolio and what to remove. However, you can view the entire current portfolio in a table format.

The Dividend Hunter Additional Features

Starter Portfolio

The Dividend Hunter portfolio contains 30-40 holdings, so it can be hard for new investors to jump in and immediately invest in all of them. To address this, Plaehn offers a starter portfolio with five investments.

The starter portfolio is updated once or twice per year and includes a brief description of each holding. It’s a nice way to get started with the service without feeling overwhelmed.

Stock of the Week

Plaehn also delivers a stock of the week email during the weeks when there’s no monthly newsletter. This highlights one holding that’s already in the portfolio that Plaehn thinks is worth doubling down on right now.

This is another helpful feature for new investors to start building out their dividend portfolio.

Special Reports

The Dividend Hunter also gives you access to several special reports from Investors Alley. These vary over time, but typically cover hot trends or stocks in specific industries. A few examples of current reports include:

• The Best 100+ Stocks to Buy for 2023
• #1 “Buy, Hold, & Retire” Tech Stock
• The ‘Supercycle Backdoor’: How To Collect Monthly Income on the $2 Trillion Electrification Boom
• Sustaining Your Income During the Next Bear Market

The Dividend Hunter Performance

The Dividend Hunter doesn’t provide any information about the performance of its portfolio—either the current portfolio or the newsletter’s total return since inception. You can see the year-to-date return of each holding, but not its return since it was added to the portfolio. There’s also no way to track holdings’ price changes or yield changes over time.

That makes it difficult to assess how well The Dividend Hunter has performed compared to other dividend stock-focused newsletters like Sure Dividend or The Motley Fool’s Rule Your Retirement.

Platform Differentiators

The Dividend Hunter is one of several newsletters helping investors build long-term dividend portfolios. It’s different from newsletters like Sure Dividend and Rule Your Retirement in that the picks are solely focused on dividend yield, whereas those newsletters also consider price appreciation and growth potential.

One of the best things about The Dividend Hunter is that it categorizes holdings into stable, variable, and fixed-income payouts. That provides a level of diversification within an income portfolio and can be especially helpful during a market downturn.

Another benefit to The Dividend Hunter is that it provides a starter portfolio and weekly recommendations for top dividend stocks from the current portfolio. It’s reminiscent of how The Motley Fool’s Stock Advisor newsletter comes with a starter stocks list and a top stocks list. These features make it much easier to get started with compared to some other stock recommendation newsletters.

What Type of Investor is The Dividend Hunter Best For?

The Dividend Hunter is designed for long-term investors who want to build a high-paying dividend portfolio. The service is ideal for retirement investors who need fixed income and stable dividends. But it also works well for more risk-tolerant investors who are willing to invest in ultra high-yield stocks that could potentially suffer dividend cuts in the future.

Notably, The Dividend Hunter doesn’t require any self-directed research. All you have to do is read the newsletter. Investors who want to do more of their own analysis may be better off with a dividend stock research platform like Dividend Investor.