2 Dividend Stocks That Had a Record Year and Are Just Getting Started

In periods of rising inflation and slowing economic growth, investors have historically turned to dividend stocks to see them through. The asset managers at Hartford Funds looked at the performance of the benchmark S&P 500 going all the way back to 1930 and found that dividends contributed 40% to the total return of the index over that 91-year period. Through wars and recessions, terrorist attacks and pandemics, dividend stocks as a category have always generated positive returns, even during the so-called "lost decade" of the 2000s when the dot-com bubble burst, 9/11 happened, and the financial markets brought down the housing market.