One of the best aspects of investing on Wall Street is that there's no one-size-fits-all strategy. There are stocks and/or exchange-traded funds that can be a fit for all investment approaches.

But when push comes to shove, it's pretty difficult to top the reliability of returns from dividend stocks over the long run.

A decade ago, the wealth management division of JPMorgan Chase released a report detailing the absolute outperformance of dividend stocks, relative to those that don't offer a payout. Over the 40 years examined (1972-2012), the companies that initiated and grew their payouts generated a robust annualized return of 9.5%. Meanwhile, the nonpayers trudged their way to an annualized return of 1.6% over the same four decades.

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Source Fool.com