How to boost your income as dividends come back in fashion

Dividends are back in fashion. But how do you go about building an income-generating portfolio?

Rio Tinto worker
Rio Tinto: high-yielding miner
(Image credit: © Taylor Weidman/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Dividend investing fell out of fashion during the growth stock boom of recent years. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that investors didn’t want to hear about companies who couldn’t think of anything better to do with their money than to give it back to shareholders. With interest rates at ultra-low levels and inflation near zero, investors wanted to see growth rather than cash returns.

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.