Blog: Almost nothing paid off for investors in 2018, as the bull market headed to the slaughterhouse

As the long bull market nears its end, Arone said investors should consider focusing on quality over growth by looking for companies with stable earnings and strong profit margins. A good place to look, he said, is the S&P 500’s Dividends Aristocrats index, which tracks companies that have increased dividends annually for the last 25 straight years. Those firms include AbbVie Inc., 3M Co. and Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. Shares of all of them, like the index itself, are down at least 5% for the year. But each company returned a higher percentage of its stock price in annual dividends to shareholders this year — at least 2.6% — than the 2.1% figure for all S&P 500 companies.