Proponents of the Dogs of the Dow strategy argue that blue-chip companies do not alter their dividend to reflect trading conditions and, therefore, the dividend is a measure of the average worth of the company; the stock price, in contrast, fluctuates through the business cycle. This should mean that companies with a high yield, with a high dividend relative to stock price, are near the bottom of their business cycle and are likely to see their stock price increase faster than low-yield companies.
Under this model, an investor annually reinvesting in high-yield companies should out-perform the overall market. The logic behind this is that a high-dividend yield suggests both that the stock is oversold and that management believes in its company's prospects and is willing to back that up by paying out a relatively high dividend. Investors are thereby hoping to benefit from both above-average stock-price gains as well as a relatively high quarterly dividend. Of course, several assumptions are made in this argument.
The first assumption is that the dividend price reflects the company size rather than the company business model. The second is that companies have a natural, repeating cycle in which good performances are predicted by bad ones. Due to the nature of the concept, the Dogs may come from a small number of sectors. For example, the ten stocks that belonged to the 2015 Dogs of the Dow list came from only six sectors, including industrials, energy, and healthcare,[2] in contrast to the S&P 500 Index which covers eleven sectors.