Ramona Persaud looks for stocks the way she once approached engineering: with great precision. She picks apart businesses and examines trading data until she finds exactly what she wants. That is usually a high-quality company with a dividend, often a growing one, and always an attractive price. She rarely settles for less.
Persaud, who manages the $7 billion
Fidelity Equity-Income
fund and the $148 million
Fidelity Global Equity Income
fund, studied engineering at the Polytechnic Institute at New York University and later taught herself computer coding in order to digitize trade-clearing at Wall Street firms. Then, in 2003, she joined Fidelity and moved into investing.
Since she became lead manager on the Fidelity Equity-Income fund in 2018, the fund has notched an annual average return of 9.06%, beating 71% of its value-investing peers, according to Morningstar. Analysts at Morningstar highlight her savvy stock picks and willingness to stray from her index.
Barron’s spoke with Persaud in early November by phone and again via email to see what kind of dividend stocks she’s favoring at a time when cash is yielding 5%. Edited excerpts…
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