There are several factors an investor in the stock market should consider:
1. All stock purchases should be commission-free.
2. All stocks purchased should be from a company that has a history of raising their dividends every year.
3. The company should not only have a history of raising their dividends every year, but should also show price appreciation in the market place.
4. All dividends from these companies should be rolled-over into more shares of their company, until you retire. This should all be done by the companies, automatically, for the stockholder, commission-free.
5. The companies purchased should have staggered pay-out dividend dates, so dividend income by 12 companies will provide the shareholder a cash dividend income every week of the year.
6. A systematic approach of dollar-cost averageing into each stock (your dividends from each company will be doing this automatically)should be done on a quarterly basis. A savings plan should be adopted to add to your holdings every quarter, along with the the dividend reinvestment.
7. Stocks purchased should pay a dividend yield of at least 2.0% or better. A low 2.0% dividend yield isn't necessarily bad because it means the company in question is using most of their profits to expand. In other words,it's a growth stock with business, profits and earnings growing. A growth stock makes up for the lower dividend yield because their stock prices will more than likely rise faster.
8. The company should have been in business at least eight years, showing dividend increases each year. This will eliminate the risk involved in putting money into a risky new start up company (the type of company that is going to change the world- they are just too hard to find).
9. The company must have a stock dividend reinvestment plan (DRIP). If the dividend paid by the company is $2.63 for the quarter, all of that money will purchase a further percentage of shares(partial shares) and this is done automatically for you by the company or their transfer agent.
10. The companies you purchase should be purchased with the intent of realizing increasing cash dividends for you and your family for the rest of your lives.

Below is an 'excerpt' from my book 'The Stockopoly Plan' soon to be released by American-Book Publishing, and I would like to share it with you.

Have you ever noticed how some words in the English language are so perfectly named for what they describe? And how some words seem to be, I guess you could say, backwards? For instance, the word 'sunflower'! How wonderfully aptly named is the sunflower, that beautiful yellow flower that follows the sun fron sunrise to sunset.
And then there are those words in the English language where their meaning appears to be backward, so to speak - like parkway and driveway. When my car is parked at home, I would think it would be parked on, well, a parkway -and when I'm driving on the road somewhere, I would think I'd be driving on a - a driveway.
In the stock market world, I think the word analyst is a perfect word in the English language and stockbroker sounds right to me ,too. And this leads me to what I call the brainwashing mantras of Wall Street.
The brainwashing mantras of Wall Street may take the form of a number, such as a stock rating of 1, 2, 3 etc. Or the mantras may be a star, 1 star, 2 stars, 3 stars etc. The mantras may be a word or a group of words - attractive, unattractive, neutral, market perform, market out-perform, market-underweight, market equal-weight, market over-weight, sector perform, stong buy, buy, sell, strong sell. These mantras are so ingrained in Wall Street and investor's minds that they have created multi-billion dollar industries. There are other types of mantras, such as RSI (relative strength index-a trading volume indicator), Bollinger Bands (named after its creator John Bollinger(he use to be a regular on CNBC)and the bands deal with the channel a stock trades in,in relation to its 'moving average'- another mantra). Stochastics (used to tell if a stock is 75% over-bought - too many people have been buying) or 25% over-sold (too many people have been selling), Momentum, MACD (Moving Average Convergence/Divergence-price of the stock in relation, up or down, to its moving average, 50-day, 200-day moving averages, triple bottoms and tops, pendants, flags, bear and bull markets, head and shoulders formations, double bottoms, PE ratios etc,etc,etc.
All these mantras serve a purpose -(and, I admit, if you are going to trade the market they are useful)- they create commissions! And in my opinion, have no meaning what-so-ever for the long-term, dollar-cost averaging, buying investor of company's shares, free of commission charges, whose companies raise their dividend every year, with the investor's idea or purpose being to provide an 85% tax-free income, through ever-increasing dividends for the rest of their lives, no matter what the price of the stock at any given time in the market place be. (Whew! What a sentence!)

For more information on 'The Stockopoly Plan' visit the website www.thestockopolyplan.com or send an e-mail - mailto:
charles@thestockopolyplan.com