Iggy's Journal: The Question Most Dividend Screens Skip Entirely

5 September 2026, PM

Masterclass Release

New free Masterclass piece is up, part of the "Before Any Dividend Stock Earns a Place in Your Portfolio" series. This one's built around a trap that catches even careful screeners, a company can look completely disciplined on debt and still be quietly thin on interest coverage, and gearing alone won't show you that gap.

The example in the piece is a real one, a REIT with a genuinely strong balance sheet by the debt-load measure, comfortably inside the ceiling, but its actual interest coverage tells a different story once you look past the headline gearing number. The yield on that name looks perfectly healthy today too. Point of the piece is that the yield you can see right now and the yield you can actually count on a few years out aren't automatically the same thing, and that gap is exactly where retirement income portfolios take quiet damage nobody notices until it's too late.

My Personal Take

This is one of those Masterclass topics I keep coming back to because almost nobody checks it. Everyone looks at the debt number, ticks the box, moves on. The coverage ratio question is less intuitive, and that's exactly why it matters. Free for everyone this one, no paywall, because I think this specific mental checklist is worth more people having in their back pocket before they buy anything for yield.

📺 YouTube: https://youtu.be/bSUwnvtB-kA

📩 Substack: https://investingiguana.com/p/before-any-dividend-stock-earns-a

Not financial advice. Iggy's Forensic Compliance Standards apply.

Cheers, Iggy 🦖