Jenny Harrington - Dividend Investing, Risk Management, and Building Reliable Income Streams

**Michael Mauboussin** (0:01)
Welcome to a new edition of the Value Investing with Legends podcast. My name is Michael Mauboussin, and I'm an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School and a faculty member at the Heilbrunn Center for Gram and Dodd Investing.
I'm here with my co-host Tano Santos, the Robert Heilbrunn Professor of Asset Management and Finance at Columbia Business School and the faculty director at the Heilbrunn Center. Hi Tano, how are you doing today?

**Tano Santos** (0:25)
Doing great, whatever you say, Michael.

**Michael Mauboussin** (0:28)
We teach that the value of a company is the present value of the cash the company can distribute to its shareholders over its life. However, we don't always dwell on how that happens. That is, the ways the company can enrich its owners. Our guest today is laser focused on the stocks of companies that pay meaningful dividends to their shareholders as a source of steady and reliable income. There is no doubt that receiving dividends every quarter can benefit shareholders financially while providing them with peace of mind.
Companies in the S&P 500 paid out roughly $670 billion in 2025, and we know that dividends are less volatile than earnings or share buybacks. The question is how to find those companies that are willing and able to provide that steady stream and to build a diversified portfolio to capture the benefits.

**Tano Santos** (1:18)
Yeah, this is absolutely correct. That dividends is sometimes forgotten as that critical component of returns. We emphasize earnings growth rates of multiple expansion or compression, but that dividend yield can be a phenomenal source of returns, and the reinvestment of those dividends can compound dramatically to yield very good performance over the long run. So we don't talk enough about these.
And I think it's wonderful to have our guest today illuminate all these topics for us.

**Michael Mauboussin** (1:47)
Yes, let's get into it. We are delighted to welcome Jenny Harrington, Chief Executive Officer of Gilman Hill Asset Management, an income-focused boutique investment management firm. Jenny also serves as portfolio manager of the firm's flagship equity income strategy, which she created and has managed since its inception. The mandate of the fund is to generate a 5% or higher dividend yield with some potential for capital appreciation.
Prior to joining Gilman Hill in 2006, she was a Vice President in Private Wealth Management at Neuberger Berman, where she originated the equity income strategy. She began her career at Goldman Sachs, first as an analyst in the Private Client Services Group, and later as an associate in the Investment Management Division. She is a contributor on CNBC, where she regularly appears on Halftime Report and Worldwide Exchange, and is the author of the book, Dividend Investing, published in 2025
Jenny is generously donating all the profits from that book to the Council for Economic Education. And perhaps most importantly and to our delight, she is also a graduate of the Columbia Business School. So welcome, Jenny, and thank you very much for joining us today. There's a lot of ground we'd like to cover.

**Jenny Harrington** (3:03)
Thank you so much for having me.

**Michael Mauboussin** (3:05)
Let's start at the beginning. Tell us a little bit about your family and how you found your way into portfolio management.

**Jenny Harrington** (3:10)
Okay, sounds great. So I come from a purely, entirely, extremely entrepreneurial family. My father was an entrepreneur. It was a huge financial roller coaster. We had big ups, we had big downs. I am the oldest of four. I have three younger brothers, and we all work for ourselves now. In fact, two of my brothers, you might recognize from Van Leeuwen Ice Cream. So the name is not coincidental.
But it was a roller coaster, and I learned a lot from it. Some really hard lessons like the value of having a safety net and what it feels like to have your car break down and have a full on panic attack because you can't pay for it. But I also learned resiliency and flexibility, and the value of having a dependable income stream. So I was always working. I had three jobs at a time all through high school. I would be babysitting on Friday nights. I was bookkeeping for a sales rep who sold belay sunglasses. I was cashiering at a local grocery store. It was back then called Hay Day. I believe it's now Balu Cheese and so many other jobs in the mix too there. But one of my many odd jobs along the way was I was working at a barn and I was also cashiering and counting money in a drawer. I have always loved making money. Our neighbors when we were growing up would tell you I would come around with like a traveling tag sale and a wheelbarrow where I'd go sell chocolate chip cookies. But making money has always been thrilling to me. So I was working at this barn, also cashiering, talking to one of the customers and said, what does Mr. Keefe do? She said, Mr. Keefe's a money manager. Having no idea what money management actually meant besides counting money in a cash register drawer, I told her, I love money management. Do you think he wants a free intern? To which she said, I'll ask him. So the next day she comes back and she says, Harry says you can intern for him. Well, it turned out that was Harry Keefe. Harry Keefe who had been one of the founders of Keefe Bretton Woods who had retired and started a hedge fund called Keefe Managers.