A return to dividends

Question: What's driving the renewed interest in dividend paying stocks?

Dan Peris: I think it's really a concern about risk. Indeed, for the past several decades, not really just the last few years, dividend focused investments have been out of favor. That is partially due to the decline in interest rates, the rise in buybacks, the rise in the great success of NASDAQ and Silicon Valley, dividends kind of fell out of favor. But at the same time, investors' tolerance for risk was also increasing, and we may have seen the breaking point of that or the end of that and investors now are more concerned about risk and that, I think, is the likely explanation for why they're turning back to some tried and true, Steady Eddie, cash flow generative, cash flow distributing companies that are the province of the dividend investor.