5 Dow Jones Stocks Every Investor Should Own

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1. Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)

The number of investors long Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) inched down by five to 121 during the first three months of 2017. The tech giant has a solid record of paying dividends, having raised them consistently in the past decade. It currently pays $0.39 per share, which is almost four-times higher than the $0.10 it paid back in 2007.

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) has delivered strong results, but it still has more potential to grow, mainly due to its cloud business, which is currently one of the market leaders, trailing only Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN)’s AWS. For the third quarter of its fiscal 2017, Azure, one of Microsoft’s cloud packages that offers services to businesses, registered revenue growth of 93%. Alongside the strong market position of Microsoft’s Office 365 productivity software and the overall expected growth of the Software-as-a-Service market, Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) is positioned for future growth. In addition, the company is committed to returning capital to shareholders, since, aside from dividends, it also recently authorized a $40 billion buyback program.

All of these factors explain why Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) is the fifth-most popular stock among the funds in our database and why it tops our list of 5 Dow Jones stocks every investor should own.

 Asif Islam / Shutterstock.com

Asif Islam / Shutterstock.com

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