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It was a week of different transportation methods: Cable cars, subway, historic streetcars, buses, airplanes, the Brightline train, Uber, Lyft, and self-driving taxis.The technology was vastly different among them all.  My favorites were the two on either end of my spectrum — the cable cars and the self-driving taxis.

One of the core principles of a long-term dividend portfolio is to invest in companies that are integral to society and will be for many years to come. Transportation falls into that category. The technology will change and the mode of transport will differ depending on the distance traveled. But people will always need and want to travel from one place to another.

Copa Holdings SA (CPA)

Of all the modes of transportation that I used last week, a handful are publicly traded: JetBlue Airways Corp. (JBLU), Uber Technologies, Inc. (UBER), Lyft Inc. (LYFT), and Waymo’s parent company Alphabet Inc. (GOOG). JBLU, UBER, and LYFT do not pay dividends. GOOG pays $0.80 annually for a yield of just 0.44%.

None of these would work with our two-pronged dividend strategy. But CPA is different. It’s based in Panama and its shares trade on the NYSE. The company has yet to announce its third-quarter earnings, but it reported a Q2 net profit of $120.3 million, or $2.88 per share.

For Q2, management noted that passenger traffic for 2024 was up 10.6% year over year. The airline has been recognized as the “Best Airline in Central America and the Caribbean” by Skytrax for the past nine years.

CPA currently pays its investors $1.61 per quarter for an annualized yield of 6.49%. And it’s definitely the best opportunity I’ve seen to collect a dividend from air travel.

In sum, make sure transportation stocks aren’t a category you overlook. We never know when a rogue piece of news or a transitional period could give us a discounted share price and a yield worth our time and money.

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