7 Cheap Dividend Aristocrats

In the stock market, value often is in the eye of the beholder. At a time when many stocks seem overpriced in light of a tepid global economy and anemic growth in revenues and profits, we went hunting for businesses that offer value in ways that may not be evident from their price-earnings ratios.

To make the initial cut, companies had to show higher operating earnings in the first quarter of the calendar year than in the same period in 2015—a sign that the basic business was improving despite the disappointing economy.

To make it easy for my readers, I concentrated my research on the best dividend growth stocks and used the Dividend Aristocrats Index to start the search of high-quality dividend stocks.

I screened the index by the cheapest stocks in terms of forward P/E. It's always a good way to find cheaply valuated stocks which are not affected by current, short-term accounting issues.

Here are the results...