Dividend Abundance

Week #13PPG

Stock of the Week #13 — PPG Industries (PPG)

September 8, 2026

92 ExceptionalDividendAbundance Score

Five-box test: ✓ Pays · ✓ Raises · ✓ Safe · ✓ Undervalued · ✓ Yield that matters

Week thirteen, another $100, and this week we bought a company that has paid its shareholders every single year since 1899.

PPG Industries makes paint and industrial coatings. The finish on your car, the primer on an aircraft fuselage, the coating on the food can in your cupboard. It is an unglamorous business, and that turns out to be the point.

The cleanest score we've given

PPG earns a DividendAbundance Score of 92 — Exceptional, which ties our highest ever. But look at how it gets there:

This is the first stock we've ever scored that hits a perfect 20 on four boxes. Our three previous 92s all had a soft spot somewhere: T. Rowe Price on valuation, McCormick on payout, Comcast on streak length. PPG's only weak box is the yield, and that's a statement about how much income it pays today, not a doubt about whether it will keep paying.

Sit with that 127-year record for a second. PPG has paid its shareholders through the First World War, the Great Depression, the Second World War, the inflation of the 1970s, the financial crisis and a pandemic. It has raised the payment every year since 1972. Duke Energy's 100-year record impressed us enough to write about it two weeks ago, and PPG's is 27 years longer.

It also adds materials, the ninth kind of business in this portfolio and one we have been hunting for since July.

The honest part

Two things we want on the record, because the score looks better than the whole picture.

Morningstar is less excited than our scorecard is. They rate PPG three stars with a narrow moat, and their fair value estimate is $120 against the $110.74 we paid. That's about 8% below what they think it's worth, which is a modest discount, not a bargain. For comparison, they had Edison International at five stars and 27% below fair value this week.

And our Undervalued box flatters PPG a little. The same thing happened with McCormick. PPG traded at 1.67 times Morningstar's fair value in 2021, meaning it was genuinely expensive back then, and that inflated year sits inside the five-year yield average we measure against. So "30% cheaper than usual" is partly a statement about how overpriced it used to be. Some of the higher yield also comes from PPG simply raising the dividend 54 years running, which lifts the yield without the stock getting any cheaper. A fairer summary: PPG is reasonably priced with an outstanding dividend record, rather than deeply on sale.

The two we said no to

This was the most interesting week of screening we've had, because we turned down two stocks for two completely different reasons.

Edison International also scored 92. A 5.95% yield, more than double PPG's, and Morningstar's cheapest US utility. We passed on all of it.

The reason is a number inside our own scorecard. Edison's Safe box scored a perfect 20 on a 36% payout ratio, but that ratio is calculated against trailing earnings that include a large one-time gain. On normalized earnings the payout is closer to 61%, the Safe box drops from 20 to 12, and the score falls from 92 to 84. We are telling you this because our own number was the flattering one, and we would rather say so than quietly bank a 92.

There's a second reason. Edison suspended its dividend entirely from 2001 to 2003 during the California electricity crisis, and its 23-year streak dates from the restart. Right now California's legislature has just declined to give utilities new protection from wildfire liability, which is why the stock fell 24% in a single day. That is a company that has already broken once under California political pressure, facing California political pressure again. It might well be a bargain. It is not a dividend we want to depend on.

Accenture we rejected for a reason our test cannot measure at all. It looked strong: a 3.49% yield against a historical norm near 1.5%, a 50% payout, 16% dividend growth. Boxes 3, 4 and 5 all liked it.

But Accenture sells hours of skilled analytical work, and that is exactly the work AI compresses first and fastest. None of our five boxes ask whether a business will still look like itself in fifteen years. Box 3 catches a dividend a company can't afford today. It cannot catch a company whose revenue quietly halves over a decade. A cheap price and a fat yield are what secular decline looks like from the outside, which is the same trap as a bargain, wearing the same clothes.

So we used judgment, and we're flagging plainly that judgment is what it was. The test narrows the field. It doesn't make the last call.

The numbers on this week's buy

We gave up about $3.28 a year of income by choosing PPG over Edison. On a portfolio built to still be compounding in thirty years, we'll take the 127-year record.

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

That's week thirteen. Two stocks scored 92 and we bought the one paying less, because one of those 92s wasn't quite real. See you next week for pick number fourteen.

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.

← All picks