Dividend-Stocks.com

Every stock or fund on the home page gets three A–E letter ratings — CAGR, Dividend, and Volatility — shown as a maroon 12-point star badge in the corner of the matching chart. Each rating is graded on its own scale, described below.

The letter itself is colored to make it easy to scan at a glance: green for A/B, blue for C, maroon for D, and red for E.

Measures how the stock's annualized (compounded) price growth over the 1, 3, 5, and 10-year periods stacks up against an appropriate benchmark. The rating counts how many of those periods the stock's CAGR beat the benchmark's: A for winning all 4, B for 3, C for 2, D for 1, and E for none. A period counts as a "win" if the stock's CAGR is at or within 1 percentage point of the benchmark's, not just strictly higher — the 1-year period especially is noisy, and a near-tie shouldn't read the same as a clear loss.

Choosing the right benchmark takes a few steps, since comparing every holding to the same yardstick doesn't make sense across different asset classes. This same benchmark is also what the "Compare with..." toggle overlays on the charts — so the number driving the badge is always the one you can see and check yourself, not a hidden calculation:

1. Sector ETF (preferred). If the stock's sector can be identified (via our data provider's company data) and mapped to one of the 11 SPDR sector ETFs (Technology, Financials, Health Care, Energy, and so on), the stock is benchmarked against that sector ETF's own CAGR, and the toggle reads "Compare with <Sector> (<ticker>)" — e.g. "Compare with Technology (XLK)". A tech stock is judged against other tech stocks, not against the whole market.
2. S&P 500 or T-Bill (fallback). ETFs, funds, and stocks with no resolvable sector don't get a sector match. Rather than defaulting all of them to the same benchmark, the stock or fund's own trailing volatility decides which makes sense: low-volatility holdings (under 8% annualized) are treated as bond/cash-like and benchmarked against BIL, a T-Bill fund standing in for the risk-free rate. Higher-volatility holdings are treated as equity-like and benchmarked against the S&P 500 (VOO) instead — this covers broad-market, dividend, and international equity ETFs, along with individual stocks whose sector just didn't map cleanly.
3. Fixed scale (last resort). If even that benchmark's own data can't be fetched, the rating falls back to a fixed absolute scale based on the stock's own average CAGR: A ≥15%, B ≥10%, C ≥5%, D ≥0%, E negative. This is the one case where there's no matching chart overlay, since there's no usable benchmark data at all.

Stocks and funds with less than 3 of the 4 trailing periods available (i.e. under roughly 3 years of price history) don't get a CAGR letter at all — the badge is simply not shown. With only a period or two to go on, the grade would be decided by a single short stretch that may not be representative, especially for a young fund whose brief history happens to overlap an unusually strong or weak run for its benchmark.

Looking up VOO or BIL directly still shows a CAGR rating, even though each is its own benchmark — matching your own numbers exactly counts as a perfect result (A), not a missing comparison.

Measures dividend growth consistency: how many of the last several years saw a year-over-year increase in total dividends paid, out of the trailing 10 years of dividend history (up to 9 year-over-year comparisons). The current, still-in-progress year is annualized (scaled up to a full year) before being compared, so a partial year isn't unfairly counted as a decline just because it hasn't finished paying out yet.

Grading: A for growth in at least 8 of the last 9 years, B for 7, C for 5, D for 3, and E for fewer than 3. A requires 8 rather than a perfect 9 because dividend totals are summed by calendar year from monthly records, and a raise landing right at a year boundary can occasionally make one otherwise-fine year look flat purely from that timing — not an actual cut.

For a stock or fund with less than a full 10-year history, those same target percentages (roughly 89%/78%/56%/33%) are rescaled to whatever number of year-over-year comparisons is actually available — rounded to the nearest whole comparison rather than always rounded up, so a young fund with only a handful of comparisons doesn't get pushed into a much harsher bucket than its actual track record deserves.

Measures how much more (or less) volatile the stock's monthly returns have been compared to its benchmark — the same sector ETF, S&P 500 (VOO), or T-Bill (BIL) resolved for the "Compare with..." toggle and the Stock Growth Rating above — averaged across the 1, 3, 5, and 10-year periods.

This is graded on the ratio of the stock's volatility to the benchmark's, rather than a simple win/lose count — a diversified fund (or a sector ETF) will almost always have lower raw volatility than any single stock within it, so a strict "beat the benchmark" count would give nearly every individual stock a failing grade regardless of how calm or wild it actually is. Grading by ratio still rewards genuinely low-volatility stocks (utilities, consumer staples) with a good grade, while genuinely wild ones (small caps, high-growth names) still score poorly.

Grading: A for volatility at or below 1.3× the benchmark's, B for up to 1.8×, C for up to 2.5×, D for up to 3.5×, and E for anything higher. As with the Stock Growth Rating, looking up VOO or BIL directly still shows a rating: matching your own volatility exactly (a 1.0× ratio) lands as an A. Sector ETFs like XLK don't have their own sector data from our data provider (they're funds, not companies), so they fall to the S&P 500/T-Bill fallback like any other unclassified holding rather than benchmarking against themselves.