What even is The Dividend Experiment?

The Dividend Experiment is the question of whether a regular someone can work towards their own financial freedom, by buying shares of companies that pay out a portion of their earnings out to shareholders.

Or in other words, can you

Build a Portfolio
that Pays your Bills

The premise is surprisingly simple.

If you can earn an income outside of your salary, you are no longer beholden to your employer for your day-to-day survival.

If you buy certain investments, and they make sufficient profits they will pay you out some of that, proportionate to how much of them you hold.

The road to that goal is a little more complex, however.

You have to:

Avoidthe traps and pitfalls

Feed itenough capital to get it going

SurviveThe Boring Middle

Stay calmwhen the market isn't

Do these four for long enough and then snowball should take care of the rest.

Whether a regular someone can actually get there is… The Dividend Experiment.

How Did The Dividend Experiment Begin?

I had a job I liked.

Not loved, but liked enough.

There was nothing to complain about, which somehow made it harder to explain why something felt off.

Two candlesticks: one filled with clockwork gears, one opening onto clouds and sky

That gap, between who you are and how you actually spend your days, is The Alignment Disparity.

It's not misery.

It's the Sunday evening feeling, where you're already thinking about Monday. It's realising most of your good hours belong to someone else, and the bit of the week that's actually yours is only whatever's left over.

I didn’t even have to be particularly brave about it.

It isn't about getting rich.

It's what let me close the gap.

But that took a strategy, and the strategy took a while.

I had been investing a little while before I started making YouTube videos but it was only with The Dividend Experiment that l had come up with enough of an investment strategy worth sharing ideas about.

I had tried discussing my thoughts in the comments of other channels and similar places, but nobody's there long enough to engage fully or take it seriously. Longer videos gave people enough to work with, and their responses did the rest.

After refining my thoughts I came up with the 10 Dividend Investing Commandments, to help people to find and select appropriate dividend paying stocks. I now give this away for free for anyone who signs up to the email list, by the way. You can check it out below:

For anyone wondering these 10 Dividend Investing Commandments is also where the channel mascot (Wall St. Moses) originally came from.

The channel mascot: a wild-haired figure in sunglasses and a suit holding stone tablets, surrounded by flying banknotes

With The Dividend Experiment, I aim for something I call return-satisficing.

Most investors aim to return-maximise. This is attempting to squeeze the absolute most out of every pound. That means hours of painstaking research, learning accounting, reading balance sheets.

People will often try to insult you if you don't do it this way.

Now, that used to pay off. But as markets got more efficient, the return-to-effort ratio fell off a cliff. These days you're doing an analyst's job for free, and those guys get paid a lot.

The Pareto Principle says 20% of the effort gets you 80% of the reward. Which means the other 80% of effort is fighting over the last 20%.

Maybe that's worth it to you. Maybe it's not.

For me, 80% of the reward for 20% of the work sounds like a pretty sweet deal and it buys back all the waking hours you'd otherwise spend interpreting the balance sheet of a company that may or may not be worth your time.

So: return-satisficing. Returns that are good enough to pay you a decent income, without turning you into a part-time financial analyst.

We still need that first 20%, though. That's what the rules up there in the email are for.

Ideas, not Ego

An idea should have to survive on its own.

Attach a person to one and you give people something else to judge. They can like the person (or dislike them!), agree with what they said about something unrelated last month, decide they simply don't trust someone who talks like that.

None of it has anything to do with whether the idea works, but all of it changes how the idea lands.

Take the person away and there's nothing left to react to except the idea itself

This way of doing things has helped me as much as it's helped anyone reading.

When someone shows a rule doesn't hold, I can follow the argument instead of getting blocked by the ego and fix it.

That sounds easy. It isn't.

Once an ego has attached to something…

That's when you start defending the indefensible.

The commandments are the obvious example. They're not exactly what they were when I first wrote them, because you lot stress-tested them over time.

You found the wording that was ambiguous, the case where a rule fell over, suggested improvements to the criteria.

What came out the other side survived all of that.

The version you'll read isn't the first thing I thought of, it's what's still standing.

Same goes for everything else here. Almost none of it is a first draft. It's been through an audience that cared enough to argue, and it got better every time.

So, there's no personal brand here. Just the ideas.

Enter The (Almost) Daily Dividends Pie

A friend once told me he was day-trading his portfolio to pay for lunch. If he made money that day, he ate. If he didn't, he went hungry.

I thought that was crazy.

Some days he just didn't have lunch.

Whether he ate came down to guessing which way a share price would move that morning, and nobody gets that right consistently. He was in control of the decision, not the outcome.

The obvious alternative was a portfolio that produced the lunch money on its own.

Money that turns up whether the market is up, down or sideways. Dividends arrive on schedules, and those schedules don't have to overlap. Most people hold companies that all pay in the same few months, so the income comes in lumps with long gaps in between.

Stagger the payment dates and the same money can pay you (almost) every day. Or least most of the days the the market is open across the year.

When Trading 212 launched the Pies feature, I built the closest approximation I could.

An illustrated pie with a slice cut out revealing a candlestick chart inside, with weekday buttons and a banknote dispensing from the side

It's since become the most popular thing here by a distance, and that's created a strange situation: for most people, the (Almost) Daily Dividends Pie is The Dividend Experiment. They find it on Trading 212, copy it, and only later work out there's a channel and a website attached.

Nothing wrong with that, but it does mean thousands of people know one portfolio and none of the thinking surrounding it.

It also meant every video here ended up with the same comments underneath it, regardless of what the video was actually about.

So, the Pie got its own channel: Almost Daily Dividends, where the tracking series lives and where pie-specific questions belong. That way this channel can be about the ideas, and that one can be about the portfolio.

The pie is a part of The Dividend Experiment, not the other way round.

The Dividend Experiment is the ideas, the frameworks, the tools and all the portfolios; the (Almost) Daily Dividends Pie is one of them.

It's just the one most people arrive through, which is why it gets mistaken for the whole thing.

It's also worth knowing that, despite what people think, I don't actually earn anything specifically from someone copying it. One copier or a million makes no difference to me, which is why I'd rather you understood it and it matched your investment goals and strategy than joined it.

The (Almost) Daily Dividends Pie

A Curriculum and a Community

Two things kept coming up that the explainer videos alone couldn't fix.

The questions in the comment feed were always the same pattern.

They were asking about ex-dividend dates, yield versus total return, what an ISA actually does, whether £400 was enough to start.

The same questions, thousands of times, from people who'd already put money in. Answering them one at a time in a comment box was hopeless.

Nobody finds an answer written eight months ago to someone else.

That became The Dividend Academy: a whole structured curriculum, in order. Not a list of stocks to copy, but the reasoning underneath them, so the next decision is yours rather than mine. Theory where you need it, and then the practical part nobody teaches. How to find a payer worth owning, how to judge whether a dividend is likely to hold, and what to actually do when one doesn't.

A cartoon classroom where the students are banknotes with their hands raised, taught by a wild-haired figure in sunglasses

The second thing wasn't in the comments at all. It was in the emails. Investing like this is slow, and almost nobody around you is doing it. Friends and family either don't share the goal or actively talk you out of it, and every public forum is full of people selling something. There was nowhere to ask a question and get an honest answer from someone with no agenda.

That became The Dividend Temple: a private community of people at roughly the same stage, doing roughly the same thing. No signals, no tips, no get-rich-quick.

An explorer with a torch crossing a jungle of gold blocks towards a glowing temple, watched by a snake and a tiger holding a clipboard reading sign here

The Dividend Academy is one payment for lifetime access, including modules that are added to it later, and it comes with premium membership to The Dividend Temple.

The Dividend Academy The Dividend Temple

If that's not where you are right now, that's fine.

The vast majority of what's here is free and always will be. The commandments, the calculators, the portfolios, the videos.

Plenty of people have never bought anything and never will, and I'd rather they got something out of it than nothing.

Thinking more deeply

Answering the same questions thousands of times does something useful. You stop giving the surface answer and start noticing what's underneath it.

An impossible Penrose triangle in green and teal

Most beginners are stuck before they've bought anything, because three separate decisions arrive at once and nobody separates them out. That became the Triad Approach: the platform, the account, and the investment are three different choices. They are answers to three different questions, and people conflate them constantly.

"How much do I need?" isn't a maths question, necessarily. It's that almost nobody has worked out what their life actually costs. That became the Minimum Viable Lifestyle: the real monthly floor, which is usually a lot lower and a lot closer than people assume.

The real tension in all of this is that income and growth often pull against each other. Dividends give you flexibility now; growth gives you more later.

Go all-in on income and you give up decades of compounding.
Go all-in on growth and you're back to selling things to eat.

That became the Metronome Portfolio: a base that produces the income you need, a middle left alone to grow, and a small tip for the riskier ideas, so they can't cost you the other two. It's also why the MVL matters. Once the base covers your floor, there's no reason to keep feeding it. Everything above that can go to growth instead.

And return-satisficing turned out to be the thread running through all of it. Every one of these is a way of doing enough to get the result without turning the whole thing into a second job.

Underneath the lot, the question nobody asks directly: why bother at all? That became Three-Factor Freedom and the Alignment Disparity.

What freedom actually consists of, and the gap it's meant to close.

Where this goes

The Future of The Dividend Experiment

Experiments are supposed to conclude. This one has a finish line, at least.

When the portfolios cover the bills, the question's answered. Not rich, not retired, just the point where the income turns up whether I work that month or not. That's the whole thing.

Until then it keeps running, and it goes wherever it needs to. More portfolios, more experiments, and mostly whatever keeps coming up. That's been the pattern from the start. The commandments came from arguing in comments, the Pie came from a friend's terrible lunch plan, the Academy and the Temple came from the same questions asked thousands of times. None of it was planned, all of it came from people saying what they needed.

The channel mascot resting a hand on his chest

So the honest answer about what's next is that it depends on you.

If you want to take the first step towards building a portfolio that pays your bills, it starts with a number. Not mine, not a generic, headline retirement figure.

Work out what your Minimum Viable Lifestyle actually costs each month, and the calculator tells you how big a portfolio would cover it.

Find out what your freedom costs

This content is for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Whenever you invest, your capital is at risk.