Morgan Stanley published a note telling investors to buy dividend stocks because September is scary. The firm identified companies that grow their dividends and might go up in price. Might. They said might.
This is the Wall Street equivalent of your grandfather telling you to eat your vegetables. Dividends are what you recommend when you have nothing interesting to say but still need to justify the Bloomberg terminal subscription. September's historically bad for stocks, so Morgan Stanley's advice is to collect tiny checks while your portfolio bleeds out. Smart.
The banks love dividend stocks because they can't think of anything else to pitch when volatility picks up. Growth is too risky. Bonds are complicated. Crypto makes the compliance department nervous. So they wheel out dividend payers like it's 1955 and everyone's wearing a f*cking fedora to work.
Here's what Morgan Stanley won't tell you: companies that grow dividends every year are the same companies that will cut them the second anything interesting happens. They're paying you to hold bags that move slower than government bonds. The upside they mentioned? That's code for maybe it won't drop as much as everything else.
Retail traders will read this and immediately buy seventeen different dividend ETFs with expense ratios higher than the yields. They'll set up automatic reinvestment and check their accounts every morning like they're watching a tree grow. Then they'll wonder why their friends who bought Nvidia in 2022 retired while they're still calculating basis points.
September is rough for stocks the same way Mondays are rough for people with jobs. It happens every year and you'll survive it without Morgan Stanley's permission to buy boring shit that pays you three percent annually.
Photo by Sven Piper on Unsplash
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