繼續(xù)整理學習美國投資書《終極股息投資攻略》第2章，作者來自美國基金評級公司晨星(Morningstar)。
Dividends, Values, and ReturnsWall street has an army of professionals determined to make investing seem like rocket science. To be a sophisticated player in bonds, for example, you've got to understand concepts like duration, convexity, and option-adjusted spreads. If advanced bond analysis requires a doctorate in mathematics, the stock market throws in heavy doses of physics: Momentum, more than anything, seems to rule the day-to-day action. And on Wall Street, it's always other people's money that they're playing with. Possibly even yours.
The common denominator to all investments and strategies is cash. The buying and selling of securities generates most of the cash flow on Wall Street, but marketability is not the same as return. For an investment security to have value--be it stock, bond, or whatever--it has to return cash to its owner independently of any effort on the owner's part.Dividends, as I show in this chapter, provide the essential basis for stock value, even for stocks that might not be paying dividends at present. Without dividends, or at least the prospect of dividends, stocks are little more than handsome pieces of paper. With dividends, shares of stock take on true investment merit.This chapter begins with the premise that all investment value relies on future returns of cash, and it ends with the observation that for stocks, future returns are a function of dividend yield and future dividend growth. We have to contend with some math along the way--I hope you won't find it too boring--but these lessons are vital to understanding the principles found in the remainder of this book.
