For patient investors, Wall Street is a pathway to riches. While there are countless strategies that allow long-term investors to grow their wealth, buying and holding dividend stocks has yielded big-time rewards.

In 2013, J.P. Morgan Asset Management, the wealth management segment of well-known money-center bank JPMorgan Chase, released a study that compared the performance of dividend-paying companies to those not doling out a dividend to their shareholders over a 40-year stretch (1972-2012). This comparison produced night-and-day differences in the return column.

Over four decades, the publicly traded companies that had initiated and grown their payouts generated an annualized return of 9.5%. Meanwhile, those companies without a dividend struggled to a mere 1.6% annualized return over the same period.

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Source Fool.com