Rising interest rates prompted many investors to rotate from dividend stocks toward higher-yielding fixed-income investments like bonds, T-bills, and CDs over the past year. Over the past two decades, a modest $3,000 investment in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (NYSE: TSM), Procter & Gamble (NYSE: PG), and Target (NYSE: TGT) would have blossomed into roughly $87,000, $17,000, and $23,000, respectively, if you had reinvested their dividends through a dividend reinvestment (DRIP) plan.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (NYSE: TSM), better known as TSMC and the world's largest contract chipmaker, became the first Taiwanese company to list its shares on the NYSE in 1997. Let's see how those two deals solidified TSMC as a semiconductor superpower, how rapidly it grew over the past nine years, and if it will continue to grow. In 2014 Apple shifted its chip orders from Samsung's foundries to TSMC.
Shares of semiconductors were outpacing the broader markets, which were quite volatile today. Industry leaders Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (NYSE: TSM), Micron Technology (NASDAQ: MU), and Aehr Test Systems (NASDAQ: AEHR) were up 2.1%, 5.5%. There wasn't any company-specific news today, but the broader semiconductor sector was up strongly, even as many other cyclical industries outside of tech were struggling.