One of the easiest, and smartest, ways for investors to increase their chance of building wealth on Wall Street is to buy dividend stocks. Although growth stocks have been favored for much of the past decade, dividend stocks have a knack for outperforming over long periods.

Roughly 10 years ago, J.P. Morgan Asset Management, the wealth management division of leading money-center bank JPMorgan Chase, released a report that compared the performance of companies initiating and growing their payouts between 1972 and 2012 to public companies not offering a dividend over the same time span.

As you might have guessed, income stocks crushed the nonpayers in the return department: 9.5% (annualized) over 40 years for the dividend stocks, versus a meager 1.6% annualized return for the nonpayers over the same four decades.

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Source Fool.com