In an uncertain market, with the looming Brexit vote, elections in the United States and central bank policy moves all up in the air, experts say buying mega-cap stocks with high dividends is the way to go.
"As I look at this market right now, it's begging you to buy dividend stocks," Eddy Elfenbein, editor of the Crossing Wall Street blog, said Wednesday on CNBC's "Trading Nation." "You're getting really solid yields from many blue chip names like Microsoft and Ford."
Ford shares offer a dividend yield of about 4.6 percent, while Microsoft has a 2.9 percent yield.
In periods of volatility, defensive high-dividend stocks should tend to outperform. This is especially the case in the current market environment in which bond yields are dropping, making the yield offered by high-dividend stocks more significant. But more generally, potentially adverse events should create added interest in the sort of names that are less sensitive to the pace of economic growth.
"Britain leaving the EU is going to have a great impact on Johnson & Johnson's business model," Elfenbein said.
With the referendum on British membership in the European Union scheduled for June 23, Boris Schlossberg of BK Asset Management agrees that defensiveness is key in the current environment.
"Should [Britain] vote to leave it's a very, very binary outcome because not only is it bad for U.K,. but, it's the whole Pandora's box and opens the way for other countries in Europe to leave the European Union," Schlossberg said Wednesday on "Trading Nation.
Given this risk, Sean Lynch, co-head of global equity strategy at Wells Fargo, wrote this week that "we believe selectivity is important today. We favor U.S. large-cap equities over other equity classes in a well-diversified portfolio."
