The All-Canadian DGI Portfolio: Built for Investors Ready to Take Action
MP Market Review - May 26, 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: +4.1% year-to-date
Dividend announcements last week: None
Earnings reports last week: None
Earnings reports this week: Two
DGI Clipboard
“Far more money has been lost by investors preparing for corrections, or trying to anticipate corrections, than has been lost in corrections themselves.”
— Peter Lynch
The All-Canadian DGI Portfolio: Built for Investors Ready to Take Action
Earlier this week, we published the latest quarterly results for our MP Wealth-Builder Model Portfolio (CDN).
What began as a public experiment to build a dividend growth portfolio from scratch is working according to plan. After deploying all of our initial capital over four years, both income growth and capital appreciation are tracking closely to projections. Since inception, the portfolio has delivered a 15.35% annualized return while building a growing stream of reliable, tax-efficient dividend income.
That is the point.
We are not trying to beat the market over six months. We are building an income-producing asset designed to fund financial freedom.
In the Portfolio Letter for paid subscribers, I share several lessons from building this portfolio in real time. This week, I want to focus on three, especially for newer subscribers, considering building their own portfolio alongside us using the All-Canadian DGI Portfolio.
A quick reminder: this is not investment advice. I do not tell you what to do with your money. I simply show you what I am doing with mine, explain the process, and let you decide if it fits your goals.
Lesson #1: Being Invested Matters
The old saying is true: Time in the market beats timing the market.
Capital sitting on the sidelines does not compound. Our process ignores headlines, recession fears, elections, and media noise. We buy quality businesses at sensible valuations and let time do the heavy lifting.
One of the clearest lessons from this portfolio is simple: investors waiting for certainty usually pay for it.
Lesson #6: Position Sizing Matters
Stock selection matters. Position sizing matters just as much.
Not every company deserves the same allocation. Our highest-quality, highest-conviction holdings earn larger positions. More cyclical or less predictable businesses earn smaller ones.
This is risk management through process, not prediction.
Mistakes are inevitable. The goal is not perfection. The goal is making sure mistakes sting without sinking the ship.
Lesson #7: Delayed Deployment Has a Cost
Cash feels safe, but too much caution can be expensive.
Dividend growth investors benefit from compounding: dividends get reinvested, buy more shares, and generate even more income. But that flywheel only works when capital is invested.
We learned this firsthand. Our cautious deployment slowed progress early, though a strong market gave us time to catch up.
That may not always happen.
The lesson? Start sooner. Stay disciplined. Let compounding work.
What This Means for New Subscribers
If you are new to dividend growth investing and want a practical starting point, the All-Canadian DGI Portfolio was built for exactly that purpose.
Here is the framework:
Step 1: Decide Your Starting Capital
Start with an amount that matches your risk tolerance and your financial reality.
This is not money needed next month.
This is long-term ownership capital.
Step 2: Follow the Position Sizing Framework
Not every stock in the portfolio is equally attractive at every moment.
That is why the highlighted Investment column in the spreadsheet below matters.
It reflects our valuation framework at the time of publication and helps guide how aggressively capital should be deployed.
Quality alone is not enough.
Price matters.
Step 3: Execute the Plan
Analysis without action builds nothing.
In most cases, new subscribers should be able to deploy roughly 50% of their capital immediately using the current portfolio framework.
The remainder can be deployed over time as opportunities emerge through our DGI Alerts.
Those alerts show exactly what we are buying, selling, and how current position sizing compares to the live model portfolio.
No guesswork.
Just process.
Because building wealth is not about finding the perfect stock.
It is about consistently applying a sound process over time.
The All-Canadian DGI Portfolio
The portfolio is intentionally sorted by quality because not all businesses deserve the same amount of your capital. Our highest-quality companies earn the largest position sizes, while lower-conviction or more cyclical names receive smaller allocations. That is disciplined portfolio construction, not guesswork.
At the portfolio level, the average current dividend yield remains roughly a full percentage point below the average historical high, suggesting the portfolio as a whole is not screaming undervalued today. That is why we are only deploying 50% of our available capital at this time.
The Investment column is where our risk management framework comes to life. Initial position sizes are adjusted based on valuation, specifically how current dividend yields compare to each company’s historical yield range. Higher yields generally signal lower prices and potentially better value. Lower yields typically suggest richer valuations. This is Dividend Yield Theory in action, and it is one of the simplest ways we bring discipline to both stock selection and capital deployment.
Finally, the Returns columns provide a historical perspective. They show each company’s 10-year annualized returns for price appreciation, dividend growth, and total return, based on an equal-weighted approach. This helps you understand not just what you are buying today, but the long-term wealth-building characteristics these businesses have historically delivered.
Takeaway
For newer investors, the lesson is simple: you do not need a perfect entry point or perfect market conditions to get started. You need a sensible plan and the discipline to execute it. Our All-Canadian DGI Portfolio exists to remove the guesswork and provide a practical framework for investors who want to start building a rising stream of tax-efficient income alongside us.
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 through ideas and manage risk in 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 the 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 +4.1% YTD (capital).
Top Performers Last Week:
goeasy Ltd. (GSY-T), up +16.54%.
Magna (MGA-N), up +6.92%.
Enbridge Inc. (ENB-T), up +5.33%.
Worst Performer Last Week:
Waste Connections (WCN-N), down -0.57%.
From breaking news to quarterly earnings reports, we break down the week’s biggest headlines to help you make sense of the market.
