This first post will discuss the article written by Lucas Amorim in the Brazilian Magazine Exame "As Estrelas da Bolsa" (The Stars of the Stock Exchange) from their 1020th edition written on the 25th of July, 2012.  This article references a study, requested by Exame, by the Boston Consulting Group and was based on information from the December 2003 until December 2011.

This study found the 10 companies that had the best return for their shareholders during the eight years examined.  These companies are in order of ranking (1st % is Annual Sales growth and 2nd % of income distributed to shareholders):

1. AES Tietê (Energy)                        11% ; 37%
2. CCR (Infrastructure)                        21% ; 35%
3. Brasil Foods (Consumer Goods)      26 %; 34%
4. Marcopolo (Industrial Goods)          13%; 32%
5. Transmissão Paulista (Energy)       16 %; 31%
6. AMBEV (Consumer Goods)           16% ; 28%
7. Souza Cruz (Consumer Goods)       7%; 27%
8. Tractebel (Energy)                         11% ; 26.5%
9. Bradesco (Financial)                      20%; 25%
10. Randon (Industrial Goods)              18%; 25%

Well, this article brings up some good points and I plan to reference this article in some future postings.

Things to remember are:

Brazilian companies that had Net Income and not a Net Loss must pay 25% of this income to its shareholders
In 2011 Souza Cruz distributed to shareholders 90% of its Net Income, 1.5 Billion
When the crisis came, the commodities prices fell and sold did the shares of Vale and Petrobras

Other research needed: 

Calculate the Dividend Yield on the 10 companies, CAGR with and without dividends, and analyze their current financial to see if I should do a DCF Model and/or a Gordon DDM.
Need to do a correlation calculation between these Vale and Petrobras and the prices of their corresponding commodities.