DivSight Blog

Canadian bank dividends have survived a depression's worth of stress tests without a single cut in eighty years. That record is structural, not lucky — which is exactly why it's worth understanding what would actually have to break.

The dividend streak is the most trusted credential in income investing, and the most misread. Two Canadian names with admired streaks just wrote opposite endings. The difference was never in the streak.

Run Fortis through a standard dividend-safety screen and it fails — negative free cash flow, heavy debt, a payout that looks unaffordable. The company has raised its dividend every year for half a century. One of these two is measuring wrong.

One fund passes through bank dividends and charges almost nothing. The other runs leverage on a stack of covered-call ETFs and pays triple the yield. The past year graded both. The result wasn't close.

Downside protection is the phrase that sells more covered-call units than any yield number. It's also the claim the structure is least able to keep. Here's what actually happens on the way down — and, worse, on the way back up.

Not a yes, not a no. Covered-call ETFs are a legitimate product that most of the people buying them shouldn't own. The difference comes down to three questions about you, not the fund.

Punch any Canadian REIT into a screener and the payout ratio comes back looking like a typo. It isn't a typo. It's the wrong denominator — and the right one changes everything.

Four months before the cut, management was "very comfortable" with the payout. Then the payout dropped 60%. Here's the anatomy of the cut — and the honest answer on whether the new one holds.

Four ETFs, one label, four completely different selection machines. The fund you pick matters less than the rule it uses to pick stocks — so here are the four rules, in plain English.

A plain dividend ETF and a covered-call fund look like they're playing the same game. They aren't — but you can still score them on one scale, and you should, especially before you own both.

Everyone compares fees. Almost nobody compares fees to the income those fees are supposed to be buying — and that ratio is where the real differences show up.

Nobody buys a yield trap on purpose. They buy a great yield, and find out later what was holding it up. Here are the five signs that tell you in advance.

A 12% yield on bank stocks sounds like a cheat code. It isn't — it's a trade. Here's exactly what you're giving up to get it, in plain English.

Harvest's Premium Yield Treasury ETF has cut its distribution four times since mid-2025, a 60% reduction. We originally scored it 80/100. It now scores 52 — and the reason we changed our minds is the most useful part of this post.

A 12% yield sounds great — until you learn part of it might just be your own money handed back to you. Here's how return of capital really works, why it isn't always bad, and the one test that separates sustainable income from slow self-liquidation.

HCAL returned more than 80% in the past year and beat its benchmark decisively. Our scoring engine still rates it HOLD. Here's the full breakdown — including the one number most reviews never mention.