After five years of contributing to my portfolio every single week and reinvesting every single dividend, I finally crossed the $100,000 mark. Here’s what it taught me.

Here in the newsletter, we talk a lot about which stocks to buy and what to look for in a great investment. But this week, I want to flip the script and shed some light on five things you want to avoid when hunting down your next dividend stock.

Einstein once said that not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. The more time I spend with my head in the stock market, the more I’m realizing just how true that really is.

Investing isn’t about constantly switching strategies or chasing whatever’s working right now. It’s about finding an approach that aligns with your goals—one you can stick with through both the highs and the lows.

Money is more than just the physical dollars and cents that you visualize when you hear the word money. When you really break it down, money is a form of energy—and it flows through everything, touching almost every part of our lives.

When it comes to figuring out which stocks to buy, Buffett and Munger have given us a North Star to follow. Their timeless principles distill investing down to its most basic element and offer something most investors struggle to find: a real sense of direction.

I’m not just sharing the dividend stocks with the highest yields—I’m sharing the ones that I believe strike a solid balance between yield, reliability, and growth potential (because we still want to see increasing dividend payouts over time).

I think Mohnish Pabrai is one of the few modern investors who belongs in the same conversation as Buffett and Munger. And at 60 years old, after decades of investing, Mohnish realized that his entire investing approach had been completely flawed.

Yesterday was just one of those days in the market where it felt like everything that could go wrong, did. It made me think a lot about diversification and the role it plays in my portfolio.