Income illusions: challenging the high yield stock narrative

While stocks with high dividends have historically outperformed those with low dividends, we show that the difference can be completely explained by a set of well-known factors including value, quality and defensive. Applying a dividend filter to a portfolio of strategies having high exposure to these factors yields sub-optimal results. To test whether incorporating dividend yields can improve the performance of long-only factor portfolios, we construct a set of dividend-favored long-only factor portfolios with a heuristic rebalance algorithm and find that their after-tax net returns are lower than the dividend-agnostic counterparts. Collectively our results indicate that long-only active investors are better off loading directly on value, quality and defensive factors than purposely tilting their portfolios toward high-dividend stocks.