You've always believed that investing in shares is like taking a stroll through jurassic park. You've always doubted if there was logic in a lost world populated only by bulls and bears. You've always wondered what a rational decision about investing in stocks would be like.

Well, here's some unconventional wisdom for you: try and buy High Dividend Yield Stocks.

A relatively easy investment strategy to implement, high dividend yield stocks boast of the potential to outperform the market averages. And buying such stocks takes the guesswork out of investing.

You see, high dividend yield stocks have long histories of dividend declarations, and include many blue-chip stocks that, traditionally, maintain their dividends even during downturns.

A high dividend yield is, therefore, an indication to me that a stock is undervalued.

The beauty of dividend plays is that they put you in quality stocks when the latter are out of favour with the market.

So, they earn you attractive yields while you wait for them to come back into favour. And they generate capital gains for you when they do.

I believe that investing for dividends is an appropriate strategy right now for two reasons.

Given the fall in equity values across the stockmarket, it is actually the dividend yield that makes a stock -- and my strategy -- attractive.

Secondly, the recent changes in the taxation of dividends -- any dividend income you receive is now completely tax-free in your hands -- make the strategy even more attractive.

Of course, as with any successful stock-picking stratagem, infinite variations are possible.

I chose the 500 stocks that make up the crisil-500 as my universe, both because of the breadth of the sample as well as the profile of the companies that constitute the index, since they are mostly leaders in, or representative of, the businesses they operate in.

Moreover, such a selection automatically covered companies that have demonstrated their liquidity, in terms of both the volume of shares traded and the trading frequency. Besides, all of them had track-records of sustainable operations, which is more than I can say about the companies listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange.

Of these 500 companies, 381 were dividend-paying ones. I dropped another 16 because they had reported negative earnings in 1996-97. And the selection of 21 companies I have presented is from a subset of 106 companies with a dividend yield of over 8 per cent, whose dividend histories and earnings sustainability I personally probed.

If you do buy any of this lot, don't forget to review the portfolio periodically by recalculating the dividend yields you earn.

I love this stock screen for one simple reason: it's the closest you can get to playing the stockmarket while sitting it out -- and, best of all, it's tax-free too.

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