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With the completion of the first three months of 2019, it’s a good time to take a moment and look back at our favorite dividend growth stocks and see how they did.  It’s been a good quarter for the stock market – the S&P 500 was up 13.1% from the close on December 31, 2018 to the close on March 29, 2019.  This made it one of the best quarters for the stock market in recent memory.

So how did dividend growth stocks do?  I used finviz.com to look at a group of more than 180 stocks that have a history of growing their dividends.  I also looked at two dividend growth ETFs: the WisdomTree U.S. Quality Dividend Growth Fund (ticker: DGRW) and the ProShares S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats ETF (ticker: NOBL).

Both ETFs performed comparably with the S&P 500 – DGRW gained 13.3% while NOBL gained 12.7%.  Yield-wise, DGRW pays slightly more than NOBL: 2.32% to 2.15%.  With 300 companies, DGRW is able to pull from a larger universe of stocks than NOBL, which is restricted to the 57 components of the S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats, which gave DGRW a slight edge in the first quarter.

Making the list of best-performing DG stocks this quarter was an integrated chip designer, a jewelry company, and a food company.  Here are the top 5 performing DG stocks this quarter:

1. Xilinx (XLNX) – The chip designer is a leading provider of reprogrammable integrated chips known as Field Programmable Gate Arrays to the Aerospace and Defense industries.  Xilinx grew more than 50% in the quarter after breaking out in late January.  Xilinx is expected to announce its next dividend increase in late April; the company currently yields 1.14%.

2. Best Buy (BBY) – The electronics retailer jumped 14% on earnings in late February, which contributed to a 36% price increase in the quarter.  Best Buy yields 2.8%.

3. Dover Corporation (DOV) – With a 60+ year track record of dividend growth, Dover has the longest DG streak of all S&P 500 stocks.  The company, which yields 2.05%, jumped more than 8% on earnings in late January and continued up, hitting new highs for a total gain of 33.8% in the first quarter.

4. Tiffany’s (TIF) – After bottoming around Christmas, the jewelry manufacturer has been on a steady uptrend, also posting a gain of 33.8%.  Tiffany now yields 2.08%

5. General Mills (GIS) – As a consumer foods company, General Mills is not what you’d think of as a fast grower.  But the company’s been on a tear, with superb earnings in late March topping off a great quarter.  GIS went up by 32.6%, but is the highest yielder of these five stocks, paying out at 3.79%.

I used finviz.com to screen for these stocks. For more information on finviz.com’s features (most of which are free), you can read my blog post on how to screen for dividend stocks.