(Filed under stock tips, stock picks, stock advice )

By Kiplinger’s Personal Finance Magazine

After many dark months, investors’ appetite for risk is back, prompting a buying binge that is driving up the value of some pretty speculative stocks and asset classes.

You can play the momentum game, hoping to enter and exit a hot stock at just the right juncture. Or you can ignore the siren song of quick but highly uncertain gains and instead invest for the long term, using the tried-and-true technique of identifying companies that regularly raise their dividends.

History is on the side of the dividend strategy. Howard Silverblatt, of Standard & Poor’s, calculates that from 1926 through March 2009, reinvested dividends accounted for 44% of the 9.5% annualized return of the S&P 500-stock index ($INX). From 1972 through April 2009, dividend growers returned 8.7% annualized, according to Ned Davis Research, compared with 6.2% for the S&P 500 and just 0.7% for stocks that paid no dividends.

Why has a dividend-growth strategy stood the test of time? First, to commit to boosting its payout, a company must be financially strong and confident that its business plan will generate a stream of profit and cash flow. A growing payout, says Judy Saryan, the manager of Eaton Vance Dividend Builder fund (EVTMX), is the “best, most tangible signal that a company’s board of directors and management have confidence in future cash flows.”

Saryan notes some subtle effects of managers’ commitment to boost the