Historically speaking, when volatility picks up on Wall Street, smart investors turn their attention to dividend stocks. While not all income stocks are guaranteed moneymakers, dividend stocks, collectively, have proved to be long-term outperformers.

In 2013, J.P. Morgan Asset Management, a division of money-center bank JPMorgan Chase, released a study that compared the performance of publicly traded companies that initiated and grew their payouts between 1972 and 2012 to public companies that didn't offer a payout over the same timeline. J.P. Morgan Asset Management's analysis showed an average annual return of 9.5% over four decades for the income stocks and a meager 1.6% annualized return for the non-payers.

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Source Fool.com