One of the best aspects of putting your money to work on Wall Street is that a variety of investment styles can succeed. But when push comes to shove, it's pretty hard to beat the consistency of returns provided by dividend stocks.

A decade ago, J.P. Morgan Asset Management, the wealth management division of banking giant JPMorgan Chase, published a report that compared the total returns of publicly traded companies that initiated and grew their payouts to public companies not offering a dividend over a 40-year period (1972-2012). The results were literally night and day.

The income stocks generated an annualized return of 9.5% over four decades. By comparison, the non-payers only managed to deliver a 1.6% annualized return in the same span. Since dividend stocks are almost always recurrently profitable and time-tested, it's not a surprise to see them outperform over long periods.

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Source Fool.com