3 of the Safest Ultra-High-Yield Dividend Stocks to Buy in 2025

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Arguably the greatest aspect of putting your money to work on Wall Street is that there's no one-size-fits-all strategy to generate wealth. With thousands of publicly traded companies and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) to choose from, there are bound to be securities that can help you meet your investment goals.

But among these seemingly countless investment strategies, it's hard to overlook just how successful buying and holding dividend stocks has been for patient investors.

Companies that pay a regular dividend to their shareholders tend to have a few things in common. They're almost always profitable on a recurring basis, time-tested, and capable of providing transparent long-term growth outlooks. In other words, these are the types of businesses we'd expect to increase in value over the long run.

A person holding a folded assortment of fanned cash bills by their fingertips.
Image source: Getty Images.

Perhaps more importantly, dividend stocks offer a rich history of outperformance. In The Power of Dividends: Past, Present, and Future, the researchers at Hartford Funds compared the average annual return of dividend stocks to non-payers over a 50-year period (1973-2023). Hartford Funds found that dividend stocks more than doubled the average annual return of non-payers (9.17% versus 4.27%), and did so while being less-volatile than the benchmark S&P 500.

Taking into account that this is one of the priciest stock markets in history, buying time-tested dividend stocks might be a genius strategy for 2025.

What follows are three of the safest ultra-high-yield dividend stocks -- "ultra-high-yield stocks" have yields that are at least four times greater than the yield of the S&P 500 -- to buy in the new year, which are yielding an average of 8.53%!

Pfizer: 6.72% yield

The first ultra-high-yield dividend stock that makes for a no-brainer buy in the upcoming year is pharmaceutical juggernaut Pfizer (NYSE: PFE). Though Pfizer has been weighed down by shrinking sales from its line of COVID-19 therapies, this is a company that's unmistakably in better shape now than it was when the decade began.

For example, even though sales of its blockbuster COVID-19 therapies, Comirnaty and Paxlovid, have retraced from north of $56 billion in 2022 to an estimated $8.5 billion in 2024, this is still $8.5 billion in high-margin revenue that didn't exist when the decade began. In just four years, the company's sales are on pace to have climbed by more than $19 billion (roughly 46%), based on the midpoint of its 2024 guidance.

To add to this point, Pfizer's cumulative product portfolio, sans COVID-19 therapies and acquisitions, has continued to expand on an organic basis. Investors seem to be overly focused on the recent pullback in COVID-19 sales and have completely missed the bigger picture that shows Pfizer's oncology and specialty care segments are firing on all cylinders.


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