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Some stocks demand to be watched. I love to watch my portfolio and constantly refresh my headlines for guidance, tweaks, and whatever a single analyst said about it this morning. I get caught up looking at my brokerage app a lot.
But there's a smaller category of companies that have earned something rarer: the right to be ignored. Put money into them, and the business itself proves its worth, whether or not you check the price.
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These four, which cost $2,500 each for a combined $10,000, are the kind I'd buy and then genuinely forget I owned for a while.
Archer-Daniels-Midland (NYSE: ADM) has paid a dividend without interruption for more than 94 years and raised it for 53 straight years. That kind of streak isn't an accident of good luck. This streak makes it a Dividend King, a company that has delivered 50 or more consecutive years of annual dividend increases.
This is what happens when a business sits at the center of the global food supply chain, processing the corn, soybeans, and wheat that eventually become everything from cooking oil to livestock feed to the ingredients inside products with far flashier logos than ADM's own.
People need to eat regardless of what the market is doing that week, and ADM gets paid at nearly every step of turning raw crops into the food that ends up on a plate. That's not a business model that requires daily supervision. It requires patience.
J.M. Smucker (NYSE: SJM) just extended its dividend growth streak to 25 consecutive fiscal years, a milestone the company hit while also leaning harder into what's actually working inside its portfolio. Its Away From Home business posted double-digit sales growth recently, powered largely by Uncrustables, the frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that have become one of the more improbable growth stories in packaged food, according to Food Business News.
Smucker has also been willing to make hard calls on underperforming pieces of the business rather than propping them up indefinitely, which is exactly the kind of discipline I want from a company I'm not planning to check in on every quarter. The jam and coffee aisle isn't exciting. It's also not going anywhere.
Brown-Forman (NYSE: BFB), the maker of Jack Daniel's, has paid a regular quarterly dividend for 82 consecutive years and raised it for 42 straight ones, a run that's survived Prohibition's aftermath, multiple recessions, and now a stretch of tariff pressure on American spirits exports.
What I find reassuring isn't that the business has been immune to hard years recently; it's how the company has responded to them. Brown-Forman continued to generate strong free cash flow and returned capital to shareholders through both dividends and buybacks, even as sales growth cooled. A company that keeps the checks coming during its own tougher stretches is exactly the kind I don't feel the need to babysit.
Kroger (NYSE: KR) just raised its dividend by 11%, extending a streak of 20 consecutive years, with the payout compounding at roughly 13% annually since the company reinstated it in 2006. Grocery shopping is about as close to a nonnegotiable household expense as exists, and Kroger sits behind a huge share of that spending every single week, in good economies and bad ones.
The company has leaned into that durability by pairing steady dividend growth with consistent share buybacks, funded by free cash flow that doesn't swing wildly with trends. It's not a stock that really needs much of a PR push or a catalyst. The catalyst is dinner, every night, for millions of households.
What ties these four together isn't anything exciting; in fact, it's the opposite. Each one sits in a part of the economy that doesn't pause, go out of style, or depend on any single product cycle working out.
ADM feeds the supply chain, Smucker sits in the pantry, Brown-Forman sits in the liquor cabinet, and Kroger sits at the register. Put $2,500 into each, let the dividends reinvest, and the most useful thing an investor could do for the next few years might just be opening a different app entirely.
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Micah Zimmerman has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends J.M. Smucker. The Motley Fool recommends Kroger. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
I'd Put $2,500 Into Each of These 4 Dividend Stocks and Delete the App was originally published by The Motley Fool
