This month we’re straying from the rules a little bit. We have to be honest about that right up front. By breaking the rules, we mean we’re ignoring the scoring system and we’re ok with that. The system is meant to point out stocks, from a collection of quality stocks, that are attractive for a variety of reasons – the two most important of which are current price and dividend yield. Our mantra is “buy great companies at good prices and wait.” This month’s pick, while not the top scorer, is a solid company at a pretty good price. The top scorer this month was actually CIBC (TSE: CM) and it’s a great stock to buy if you don’t already own it or want to increase your position if you do own it. If you already own CIBC and want to diversify, our official choice this month is BCE Inc. (TSE: BCE).

Let’s talk about why we like this stock. We’ve owned BCE for some years now (it’s one of our original purchases) and has been a solid performer (it’s up 89% since we bought in May, 2010). The company has increased their dividend almost every year since 1983 (we didn’t look back farther than that) and the current dividend is $0.68 which is 4.7%. If you’ve been investing or learning about investing for any time at all you’ll know that there are lots of people tweeting and blogging about the fantastic 3% dividend yield of their favorite stock. Here at PDI we don’t even consider a stock that doesn’t pay at least 3.5%. So, you can see BCE is an attractive option for dividend investors.

So why did we choose this company this month? Simple. They’re currently trading at 8.5% below their 52-week high which means they are on sale! Now, this isn’t exactly a barn-burner sale but it’s a good price for a great company. Where have we heard that before?…