5 Defensive Dividend Stocks With An 8% Average Yield

I think most retail investors would be happy with 8% a year in an environment in which everyone from Bill Gross to Jeremy Grantham to John Bogle are urging investors to set their sights way, way, lower. With that in mind, here are 5 dividend-paying stocks from 5 different industries, which have an average yield of just under 8%. Even if you throw out the 1 outlier the remaining 4 average a very healthy 5.5% yield: Altria Group (MO), Linn Energy LLC (LINE), CenturyLink (CTL), Western Asset Mortgage Capital Corp. (WMC) and Merck (MRK).

If you noted a pattern in these 5 defensive domestic-oriented stocks, you're right. Each stock is also a representative of a group - Consumer Staples, Energy, Telecom, REITs, and Healthcare - that can also be part of a basket of stocks from that sector for larger allocations. If you want more exposure to each sector, then I believe it is prudent to have more than just the names above. However, for a properly diversified portfolio I believe there is sufficient diversification benefits from these 5 defensive stocks that only in strongly "risk-off" times would their correlations increase to where they all went down substantially without having their yields "brake" their declines.

Source: Seeking Alpha

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