This USA Today article from last week got me thinking about stock dividends.

When I first started investing, it was the NASDAQ tech boom, dot-com high-flying circus. If a company was paying dividends, that meant it was an old economy company that wasn't using its profit to reinvest in the business for growth and eventual world domination. I bought into this theory.

(In my defense, I had a chance to buy some Garden.com stock at the IPO and even I was smart enough to see there was no real business model there. They wouldn't be paying dividends because there wasn't going to be any profit.)

Anyway, with the stock market stuck in the mud, I'm reading more and more about dividends and spending more time looking for companies thay pay them. I used to think that dividend-paying companies' stock didn't appreciate, so that's why they had to give dividends; otherwise no one would buy the stock.

Not true. Many dividend-paying companies appreciate right along with the rest of the market and those little dividends are just a bonus on your return.

I know this doesn't seem like earth-shattering news. In reality, it sounds like common sense. But the markets aren't always about reality, and sometimes it makes sense to beat the fundamentals back into your head so you will make better decisions in the future.