Week #1TSCO
Stock of the Week #1 — Tractor Supply (TSCO)
88Five-box test: ✓ Pays · ✓ Raises · ✓ Safe · ✓ Undervalued · ✓ Yield that matters
We want to try something on this site, and we want to do it out in the open.
Starting this week, every week we invest $100 into a dividend stock — a real, fixed, no-excuses hundred dollars — and we show you the whole thing. What we bought, what we paid, how many shares it got us, and most of all, what it added to a growing stream of dividend income. No hiding the ball, no "results may vary" hand-waving. One hundred dollars a week, in good companies, building something real you can watch grow right alongside us.
Why $100? Because we wanted a number a regular family could actually picture doing. We've got kids and a mortgage and a grocery bill that seems to climb every month, same as you. Two hundred a week sounds nice until you try to find it. But a hundred bucks, about the cost of a dinner out and a couple of subscriptions, is a number most of us can wrap our heads around. And here's the part we most want you to see: it isn't the size of the deposit that's the magic. It's what happens when you do it faithfully and let the dividends compound. Stick with us a year or two and the income number on this page is going to surprise you. It's going to surprise us too.
The five-box test
Every pick has to earn its spot. Before a stock gets a single dollar, we run it through five simple boxes:
- Pays a dividend. The entry ticket.
- Raises it consistently. A history of increases through good times and bad.
- The dividend is safe. A sensible payout ratio, with room to keep raising.
- It's undervalued. We don't overpay, even for a great business.
- The yield is high enough to matter. Income you can actually feel.
So let's meet week one's pick.
This week's buy: Tractor Supply (TSCO)
If you've spent any time in small-town America, you know the store. Tractor Supply is where you go for the chicken feed, the fence posts, the work boots, the dog food, the trailer hitch — often all in one Saturday-morning trip. The company serves recreational farmers, ranchers, tradesmen, and small businesses. In plainer words: people who do their own work.
Here's how it runs the test right now:
- Pays? Yes — about $0.96 per share a year after its recent 5-for-1 stock split.
- Raises? Like clockwork, roughly 15 straight years of increases, including a bump earlier this year.
- Safe? The payout ratio sits in the mid-40s percent. Less than half of earnings fund the dividend, which leaves plenty of room to keep raising and to ride out a rough patch.
- Undervalued? We think so. At about $30.92 the shares yield around 3.1%, well above their own five-year median near 2% — a sign the stock is cheaper than it usually is, not more expensive.
- Yield high enough? Around 3.1%. That's real, useful income, comfortably above the broad market.
Five boxes, five checks. On our scoring scale that earns Tractor Supply a DividendAbundance Score of 88 — Strong (you'll see the badge on this page, and the full method on How this works).
Why this week
We'll be honest about the cloud over it, because that's the whole point of doing this in the open: a couple of analysts recently trimmed their price targets on TSCO, and one stepped to the sidelines at "neutral." Add the obvious competition — Walmart, Lowe's, and Amazon all want the same dollar — and you can see why the market is a little cool right now.
But here's where we land. We're all feeling inflation. And when budgets get squeezed, a lot of us stop paying other people to do things and start doing them ourselves: fixing the fence, tending the garden, keeping up the property, raising a few chickens. When folks do their own work, they need supplies, and they get them at places exactly like Tractor Supply. We see that do-it-yourself shift as a quiet tailwind for the very company that serves those people, the kind of thing you notice standing in the checkout line that doesn't always show up in an analyst's model.
We're buy-and-hold-forever investors. We're not trying to guess where TSCO trades next quarter. We're asking whether we want to own a slice of this business for the next fifteen years and collect a raise nearly every one of them. Framed that way, the recent gloom looks less like a warning sign and more like a door held open.
The numbers on this week's $100
We put the full $100 in and let the broker buy a fractional slice, so every dollar is working:
- Invested: $100.00
- Bought: about 3.23 shares at $30.92
- New annual dividend income added: about $3.11 per year
- Every dividend Tractor Supply pays gets automatically reinvested back into more Tractor Supply (DRIP), so the share count, and the income, climbs on its own between our weekly buys.
That $3.11 is going to look tiny today. That's fine. That's the point. The running totals live on the portfolio page, and the home page has a slider you can drag through time to watch the income grow, week by week, with a dashed line projecting where steady $100 buys could lead. You never have to take our word for it.
That's week one. We bought TSCO, we're holding it, and we'll see you next week with pick number two.
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.