[Beginning of Cramer's verbatim comments for this segment...]

Jim:          Take a look at Hasbro Inc. (HAS), the game and toy maker that just announced a magnificent quarter today… one that makes you feel as though you have hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place, if you own the stock… Hasbro delivered a huge upside surprise, one of the biggest in a while… it’s earnings came in at $1.09, .28 cents higher than the streets consensus… you would think that the street would understand what is hot and what is not… but they don’t… and revenues were $1.38b or $400m above what the analysts were looking for…

Isn’t that incredible?...

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Alright, now how would you feel that you could have seen Hasbro’s huge beat coming? One that caused the stock to leap $3.91, or 12.7% in a single day… especially on a horrible day like today… and today was really horrible, there is no mincing it, this is part of the 2010 problem that I have been telling you about… the market is too thin, does not act well… what would you think if I said that Hasbro telegraphed this move? That you could have seen this coming… and there was a way to play other stocks like it in the future… that is right, there is a tell that some companies have that allows you to know when their business is doing much better than Wall Street seems to indicate.

On Thursday Hasbro hiked its dividend, it hiked its dividend big… and this was not just an old dividend raise, not by… this was a smoking good dividend raise, it was a massive 25% boost… the fourth largest percentage dividend increase so far this year… like I explain in Getting Back To Even, where I have a whole chapter devoted to dividend investing… when a company gives you a gigantic dividend boost, that is a true sign of strength…not an upgrade… not a press release… this is money… you could have nailed Hasbro… gotten in ahead of today’s big move just by looking at the dividend growth… and that dividend is one of the reasons why I recommend this stock as a great buy for your kids on June 19th… when it was at a lowly worm $25.14...we just got a 38% gain.

Now I know that the rap on dividends is that they are dull and boring, blah, blah, blah… as top picking stock picker Ke$ha would say… but doesn’t that make you want to hear a little more about the power of dividends? Dividend boosts, like love, are a many splendor thing… and boy, do I know it… and it would be darn right nuts not to pay attention… buying stocks with high yields and then reinvesting your dividends into those stocks is one of the greatest ways to make money out there, plain and simple… it is a great defense against the nonsense that was on your screen today… because it allows your investment to compound over time… meaning the money from your dividends pays dividends… and this effect is amplified in a stock like Hasbro that raises its dividend too… giving you compounding and increasing dividends… going back to January of 1926, about 40% of the return from the S&P500 has come from reinvested dividends… that makes them essential for capital appreciation… Wall Street jibberish for growing your money… and they have got you covered in the capital preservation side as well… protecting your money… something that we have been especially concerned with lately as Beijing and Washington have put their respective jack boots on the jugular of this market.

High yielders are less susceptible of getting annihilated in a brutal sell off… even when driven by hedge funds gone wild as we have seen over the last two weeks… because of something called yield support… as the stock price goes lower, its dividend yield goes higher… right now HAS has a 2.9% yield, but if it were to fall to$33.33, probably some lucky number, it would yield 3%… at $28.57 it would have a juicy 3.5% yield… and by the way, I would be a monster buyer of this stock at $33 or less, precisely because of that yield… they can give you that yield, because look at these products… these are just things that do not go away… yet dividends are just what the doctor ordered, Dr. House, perhaps lamented by some conundrum … and that is why all this week I will be highlighting stocks like Hasbro that have recently given their payouts a boost.

So far this year 70 US companies with market capitalizations over $1b have raised their dividends… and of them, 24 have announced double digit percentage increases… with 9 raising their dividends by more than 20%… I am going to focus on the best of these dividend raisers, like Hasbro, even though I would not buy it right here… for all of the reasons that I just gave you as well as the prediction factor, all of these companies have told us that we can expect great things from them when they hike their dividend… that is why, it is not just like, hey listen we are doing well… it is like we are putting our money where our mouth is, we are not even talking here is your dividend boost.

So what else should you look at when you are analyzing a dividend raiser like Hasbro? That dividend hike from .80 cents a year to $1.00 a year, may be impressive… but there are other things that you need to take into account as well… sometimes companies raise their dividends when they should not… so you need to figure out if that dividend passes the Olivier in “Marathon Man” test, is it safe? Get out the clove… Does the company earn enough money to cover the payment? We like it when the earnings per share equals twice the size of the annual dividend… Hasbro is expected to earn $2.13 a share in 2010, and $2.76 in 2011... hey look, that is more than twice this new annualized dollar dividend… so you know that the dividend is protected by the earnings… and that company has room to raise the dividend more in the future… something that, for instance, Pitney Bowes just did last week… a company whose reliable dividend I highlighted in Getting Back To Even, even as I questioned it last week, incorrectly.

You want to look at the underlying business, which in Hasbro’s case is kind of fantastic… it’s entertainment licensing revenues, this is where the big gains are because they basically do not have to do anything, up 48% in the quarter vs. the previous year… this is the part of the business that handles the licensing for Hasbro’s properties… you know like Transformers, G.I. Joe… along with digital games, movies, TV, online entertainment… Hasbro is also entering the TV business, it is expected to launch a new network called the Hub Discovery… Hub with discovery… this is a law journal book, oh it was propping up things, I am sorry… look it is on U-Tube, if it were on a cable channel we would not do this stuff… the Hub with discovery communications in the second half, which would feature a number of shows based on Hasbro franchises… this company is about a whole lot more than just Monopoly, Operation, or Jenga, which I am addicted to… with the Cramer devoid “Iron Man II”, expected to come out in the middle of this year… and “Toy Story III” and “Transformers III” coming in 2011, Hasbro has got plenty of catalysts… should allow it to make more money and keep increasing that dividend.

This is good, learn from Hasbro… dividend increases are the true abjures of what the health of the market is… not the oil futures, the dollar, gold, the yen, Carey trade, Greece, Euro… anyway, all of those things are full of sound and fury but signify nothing when it comes to 99% of the fundamentals that control stocks… do you think that the dollar is going to move the sales of Easy Bake? I mean, look at how good Easy Bake is now… I could like, you know you could like pop in a pizza in this thing… and that makes us more bullish, because from November thru January, 47 companies in the S&P 500 raised their dividends, while only 4 cut… that is a huge improvement from the same period the year before… where we got 40 dividend raises, and 21 cuts… that is the fundamentals, people… that is good news.

Here is the bottom line…

[verbatim recap]

[end of segment]

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