Don Taylor at the Franklin Rising Dividends Fund disregards companies’ current dividend yields when selecting stocks. Instead he focuses on the strength of their underlying businesses. If a company increases its sales, earnings and cash flow enough to support significant and consistent increases in dividends, its stock should perform well in the long run, he reasons. Taylor has used that strategy since he helped establish the $19.4 billion Franklin Rising Dividends Fund FRDPX, -0.44% in 1996. The fund’s strategy is to select companies that are expected to post double-digit increases in dividend payouts over the long term. “The core is underlying business growth,” Taylor said in an interview Jan. 16. In other words, if a company is reinvesting to keep its business growing over the long haul, that in itself will support significant increases in dividend payouts.via