Being Lucky vs Being Good
MP Market Review - April 21, 2026
Summary
This is not a stock-picking newsletter.
It’s a behind-the-scenes look at how a dividend growth portfolio is built, maintained, and improved over time.
Welcome to this week’s MP Market Review. Each week, we track the Canadian dividend growth companies on The List, our curated watchlist of businesses designed to produce rising income. While we also publish a U.S. edition monthly, Canada remains our training ground.
Our objective is simple: grow dividend income by 7–10%+ annually while delivering capital appreciation that matches or exceeds the TSX Composite in Canada and the S&P 500 for our U.S. investors over a full market cycle.
What you’re about to read isn’t theory. It’s the real-time application of a dividend growth strategy using real money, with a clear objective: growing income first and letting capital growth follow.
Markets generate a lot of noise. We ignore most of it.
Instead, we track a small set of metrics that tell us whether our dividend growth strategy is working in real time. No forecasts. No opinions. Just results.
Here they are:
Dividend income from The List: +6.4% year-to-date
Capital value: +1.8% year-to-date
Dividend announcements last week: None
Earnings reports last week: None
Earnings reports this week: One
DGI Clipboard
“I do believe it is possible for a minority of investors to get significantly better results than average. Two conditions are necessary for that. One is that they must follow some sound principles of selection that are related to the value of securities and not to their market price. The other is that their method of operation must be basically different from that of the majority of security buyers. They have to cut themselves off from the general public and put themselves into a different category.”
- Benjamin Graham
Being Lucky vs Being Good
Imagine we sponsor a global contest to find the world’s best coin flippers.
100,000 people enter. Everyone flips a coin at the same time. After each round, anyone who lands tails is eliminated. This continues until only those who flip 10 heads in a row remain.
Simple math tells us what happens next.
The odds of flipping 10 straight heads are 1 in 1,024. So out of 100,000 participants, roughly 98 people will make it to the end.
And what do we call them?
Experts.
They will build audiences. They will write books. They will explain their “process.” They will tell you what they did differently.
But we know the truth.
They got lucky.
This is exactly what happens in the stock market every single day.
A handful of investors buy the right stock at the right time. Prices rise. Narratives form. And suddenly, skill gets confused with luck.
At Magic Pants Dividend Growth Investing, we take a very different approach.
We are not trying to flip coins.
We are not trying to predict which stock will double next year.
We are not chasing price.
We are building something far more reliable. We are building income.
Dividend growth investing removes the guesswork. Instead of hoping someone else will pay us more for a stock tomorrow, we focus on what the business pays us today and how that payment grows over time.
That is the difference between speculation and process.
A rising dividend is not luck. It is the result of earnings growth, disciplined management, and durable business models. When those dividends increase year after year, something powerful happens.
The income becomes predictable.
The portfolio becomes resilient.
And over time, the market does what it always does. It follows the fundamentals.
Dividends lead. Prices follow.
Anyone can look like a genius over 10 coin flips. Very few have the patience to build a growing income stream over 10 years.
That is the real game.
Takeaway
At Magic Pants, we are not interested in being the “best coin flippers” in the room. We are focused on owning high-quality businesses, buying them at sensible prices, and letting the income snowball do the heavy lifting.
Because in the end, wealth is not built on lucky streaks.
It is built on a repeatable process that works whether the coin lands heads or tails.
Looking for a helping hand in the market? Members of Magic Pants Dividend Growth Investing get exclusive ideas and guidance to navigate any climate.
The Magic Pants model portfolios (Canadian and American) are real-money, dividend-growth portfolios funded with actual capital and executed in live accounts. Every position shown is owned, sized, and tracked in real time using our disciplined DGI process.
Become a PAID subscriber, and I’ll show you exactly how I do it. In addition, gain full access to this post and exclusive, subscriber-only content. We do the work; you stay in control!
DGI Scorecard
The Magic Pants 2026 list (The List) includes 26 Canadian dividend growth stocks, and our new American watchlist (The List-USA) contains 28 companies. Here are the criteria to be considered a candidate on our watchlists:
Dividend growth streak: 10 years or more.
Market cap: Minimum one billion dollars.
Diversification: Limit of five companies per sector, preferably two per industry.
Cyclicality: Exclude REITs and pure-play energy companies due to high cyclicality.
Based on these criteria, companies are added or removed from ‘The List’ annually on January 1. Prices and dividends are updated weekly.
‘The List’ is not a portfolio but a coaching tool that helps us think about ideas and risk-manage our model portfolio. We own some, but not all, of the companies on ‘The List’. In other words, we might want to buy these companies when valuation looks attractive.
Our newsletter provides readers with a comprehensive insight into the implementation and advantages of our dividend growth investing strategy. This evidence-based, unbiased approach empowers DIY investors to outperform both actively managed dividend funds and passively managed indexes and dividend ETFs over longer-term horizons.
Note: In the last week of every month, I will show the updated watchlist for our American dividend growers, The List-USA. It will be shown after the Canadian watchlist below.
Performance of 'The List'
The dividend growth of The List stayed the same last week, with an average YTD increase of 6.4% (income).
The price of The List was up last week and now stands at +1.8% YTD (capital).
Top Performers Last Week:
Thomson Reuters (TRI-Q), up +11.70%.
TFI International (TFII-N), up +7.49%.
Manulife Financial (MFC-T), up +5.22%.
Worst Performer Last Week:
Canadian Natural Resources (CNQ-T), down -8.34%.
From breaking news to quarterly earnings reports, we break down the week’s biggest headlines to help you make sense of the market.
