Wall Street offers investors an assortment of ways to make money. However, few investment strategies have proved as successful over extended periods as buying dividend stocks. Last year, the Hartford Funds and Ned Davis Research published data showing that dividend stocks averaged an annualized return of 9.18% over the past half-century (1973-2022). By comparison, publicly traded companies that don't pay a dividend have delivered a considerably tamer annualized return of 3.95% over the same five- decade str ...