I like Altria (MO). Nice dividend and people will give up a lot of things before they give up their smokes. A second is Pitney Bowes (PBI). Hefty dividend, something like 20+ years of increasing dividends, 49% payout ration, and 79% owned by institutions.
Ditto, Liquor. DEO. And also for lung cancer I like VGR (not much growth in price but a hefty dividend for years.) Also in the electronics space, PHG, always in the forefront of innovation and design. Does the design work for many other companies. PG, of course, what more is there to say.
I'd go with Food/Beverages & Retail. Nice steady uptrends taking place in those sectors. MCD & MNST for food/beverages ROST & DLTR for retail I'd be buying those "on the dip" during this correction. They should come back OK.
Thanks again for the suggestions. I'm adding them to a Yahoo portfolio as fast as they can be suggested. In a couple of days, the portfolio is down -2.63% that past two trading days. MCD held up the first day and is down the least. I'm not disparaging the suggestions. I've just noticed that the Dow and the Nasdaq each have been down 1% or more for two days in a row. So the portfolio is more or less tracking what the market is doing. I would like to mention here that i am reminded of something i read in Gary Smith's decade old book (the one who showed an impressive month over month increase trading mostly mutual funds). Gary talked about a 1% selling day, involving the top three indices, which for him marked a time to start lightening positions or going to cash. We've had two 1% selling days in a row, if the S&P is also involved. What say ye?
MCD and YUM, been doubling dividends every 4 years. Average dividend increases 20-27%. As dividend increases the stock gets pulled up with it. Massive expansion in China.
It's kind of contrary to the "buy and hold" approach. If you have found some particular stocks that have proven to have longevity, I think it makes more sense to hold those for the duration (collecting the dividends). You then hedge in the shorter term with puts/inverse on the major index with which they are correlated with the intention of generating some additional cash from the downside move. This extra cash can be used to dollar/value average to reduce your basis on the buy-n-hold. Also, if you're looking for a good place to track dividend stocks, do a search for "dividata" You can look up the dividend history for anything and they also have a screener that allows you to check for things like "years increasing earnings, etc." It's pretty basic (and touchy), but it's free, so you can't beat that.