About

Dear Fellow Investor,

Welcome to the UK Dividend Stocks website. My name is John Kingham, I'm the founder and editor of this site and I'm also an insurance software engineer who retired from the rat race in 2011 to pursue my passion for investing on a full-time basis.

How I invest

I would describe myself as a defensive dividend investor who broadly follows Benjamin Graham's guidelines for defensive investors, which he wrote in the 1940s:

The selection of common stocks for the portfolio of the defensive investor is a relatively simple matter. Here we would suggest:

(1) There should be adequate though not excessive diversification. This might mean a minimum of ten different issues and a maximum of about thirty.

(2) Each company selected should be large, prominent, and conservatively financed. Indefinite as these adjectives must be, their general sense is clear.

(3) Each company should have a long record of continuous dividend payments.

(4) The price paid for each should be reasonable in relation to its average earnings for the last five years or longer. We would recommend a price not to exceed twenty times such earnings.

(5) The stock of a growing company, if purchasable at a suitable price, is obviously preferrable to others. We should recommend payment of a premium for the growth potential not to exceed about 50 percent of the value determined without it.

There is, of course, a lot of detail missing from those five points, but they still capture spirit of what I'm trying to do.

My background

My investment journey began in the mid-1990s when I started saving for my retirement. In the early years I was a passive investor, but I panic-sold everything in the dot-com crash. After 2003 the market took off without me and that was my first big lesson.

I realised that I needed to know more about investing, so I started reading books and eventually came across The Intelligent Investor by Ben Graham, the father of value investing. The idea of buying companies below fair value made a lot of sense to me, so I became a value investor.

In 2008, I began writing a blog called UKValueinvestor.com as a way of sharing ideas with other investors and improving the quality of my research by exposing it to public scrutiny.

In 2011, my employer ran into problems and I was made redundant. By that point, investing had become quite a serious hobby and I enjoyed it more than software engineering, so I decided to launch a paid monthly newsletter. The plan was to earn enough money so I could do investment research full-time, while sharing that research with a small group of like-minded investors.

In 2012, I studied for and was awarded the CFA Investment Management Certificate and in 2016 my first book, The Defensive Value Investor, was published by Harriman House.

In 2021, I moved the blog and newsletter to UKDividendStocks.com to better reflect my increasing focus on dividends. However, I am still very much a value investor, just one that buys quality dividend stocks at attractive valuations.

Over the years I've also written articles for several magazines, including Master Investor (where I was the regular "Dividend Hunter" columnist for several years) and Property Chronicle. I've included an archive of all my old Master Investor articles below.

If you have any questions, please send them to me via the Contact Page.

Good luck with your investment journey,

John Kingham