Stock of the Week · September 22, 2026

Bank OZK (OZK)

Bank OZK (OZK) · Financials

Week fifteen, a day late, and the first perfect score.

First the confession, because we publish everything: this buy happened on a Tuesday. The $100 landed in the account Monday like it does every week, and we simply forgot to place the order. Nothing about the rules changed. The money sat one extra day and the pick is the same pick. It is a good reminder that the hardest part of a weekly habit is the weekly part.

Now the pick. Bank OZK is a regional bank headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas, with about $40 billion in assets. Most people outside the South have never heard of it. Inside the banking industry it is famous for two things: it runs leaner than almost any bank in America, spending about 36 cents to bring in a dollar of revenue where its peers spend 51, and it has raised its dividend every single quarter for more than a decade, on top of raising it every year since it went public in 1997.

The scorecard: 100 out of 100

We have scored 34 stocks since June. The best score before this week was 92, shared by four holdings. This is the first time all five boxes came back with a 20.

Pays: 29 years of dividends, never cut, never suspended. That includes 2008 and 2009, when a long list of banks slashed or eliminated their dividends. Bank OZK raised its dividend both years. 20/20
Raises: 29 consecutive years of increases, every calendar year since the 1997 IPO, and the last four quarterly payments went $0.45, $0.46, $0.47, $0.48. 20/20
Safe: 31.7% of earnings paid out. Covered three times over. 20/20
Undervalued: today's 4.02% yield is about 18% above the stock's own five-year median. More on how we measured that below. 20/20
Yield that matters: 4.02%, the second-highest yield in the portfolio behind Realty Income. 20/20

How we got the "undervalued" number

The Undervalued box compares a stock's yield today to its own history, and it depends on one input: the five-year median yield. Most weeks we take that from a research report. This week the number was going to decide whether the box scored a 16 or a 20, so we did not want to lean on somebody else's rounding.

We pulled every daily closing price for Bank OZK for the last five years, 1,254 trading days, and every dividend it paid over that span, and computed the trailing yield on each of those days. The median came out at 3.40%. Today's indicated yield of 4.02% is 18% above that, which clears the +15% line for a 20.

One caveat we would rather tell you than have you find. Our published convention compares today's indicated yield, the current quarterly dividend times four, against the median of the trailing yield. If you measure trailing against trailing instead, the gap is 14.6%, a hair under the line, and this would be a 96 instead of a 100. We score by the convention we published, we apply it the same way to every stock, and we tell you where the line is. A 96 or a 100, either way it is the best dividend record we have ever scored.

The honest part

The DividendAbundance Score measures the dividend. It does not measure the stock, and this week the difference could not be clearer.

The same morning we bought, our brokerage's own rating system downgraded Bank OZK to a D, from a C the week before, on a scale where A is best. Its Quality grade is an F. A second research house cut the stock to Hold in July. We read both reports before buying, and here is what they are worried about:

Credit is softening. Bank OZK's specialty is lending on big construction projects, including office towers and condominiums, all over the country. Its non-performing assets have grown about five-fold since 2021, from 0.19% of assets to 0.99%. That is still a small number, but the direction is what the rating models grade.
Earnings are shrinking. Analysts expect earnings per share to fall about 6% this year and roughly 10% next quarter. The bank's interest margin, the gap between what it earns on loans and pays on deposits, has slipped from 5.2% to 4.3% over two years.
It is a small bank with one big specialty. About $5 billion in market value, one state for a home base, and one kind of lending it is known for. This is not Coca-Cola.

So why buy it? Because none of that touches the five boxes, and we think the five boxes are the right questions. The dividend takes 32 cents of every dollar the bank earns. Earnings would have to fall by two-thirds before the payout was in question, and this bank raised its dividend through the worst banking crisis in eighty years. The rating models are trying to guess where the stock price goes over the next twelve months. We are not. We are buying a 29-year dividend record at a price the market is unhappy about, which is precisely what the Undervalued box is for.

We will say the quiet part too: a portfolio of dividend records is not immune to a bank having a bad credit cycle. If the loans go worse than the models expect, the stock will go down more, and we will hold it, and we will tell you. That is the deal.

For the income projection we stored an 8% growth rate, not the 10% the dividend has actually grown over the last three years. The bank raises by a penny a quarter, and a penny is a smaller percentage of $0.48 than it was of $0.40. We project the arithmetic, not the hope.

The numbers on this week's buy

Invested: $101.89, which is the usual $100 plus $1.89 of dividends the portfolio collected on September 15: $0.43 from Realty Income and $1.46 from NextEra Energy. This is the second time our own dividends have helped pay for the week's pick.
Bought: 2.1317 shares at $47.80
New annual dividend income added: about $4.09 per year, the biggest single-week addition since Realty Income in week three
The portfolio after 15 weeks: $1,499.99 contributed, $4.44 reinvested, worth about $1,436.12, throwing off about $53.68 a year, roughly $4.47 a month
Fourteen holdings across ten sectors. Financials now has two names, Bank OZK and T. Rowe Price, at 13.6% of the portfolio. Technology is still the one we don't own.

The portfolio is worth about 4.5% less than we have put into it, down from 1.9% under last week. Prices fell across nearly every holding over the last seven days. We mention it because we publish everything. The income line went up $4.09 a year this week, and that is the line this portfolio is built on.

Lifetime dividends collected now stand at $4.44, and every cent of it is back in the portfolio buying more shares.

The running totals are on the portfolio page, and the slider lets you drag through time to watch the income grow.

That's week fifteen. A Tuesday buy, a perfect score, and a D rating, all in one post. See you Monday for pick number sixteen.

This is not financial advice. We're individual investors sharing our own approach and the reasoning behind our own real decisions, not licensed advisors. We own, or are buying, the stocks we write about in this series. Do your own research and consider speaking with a financial professional before investing. Dividend figures, yields, share counts, and prices are accurate to the best of our knowledge as of the publish date and will change over time.

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