The stock market's good vibes have gone a bit sour lately thanks to discouraging inflation news, high oil prices, and doubts about the pace of artificial-intelligence development and buildout. Having some solid dividend stocks cushion a portfolio's volatility, reduce reliance on stock price appreciation, and allow for better sleep. For this week's Barron's Advisor Big Q, we asked four investment pros to name their top dividend picks. Not all of them have fat yields, but our panelists like them for reasons like the strength of the businesses, their history of dividend increases, and the potential for future ones.

Nancy Tengler, CEO, chief investment officer, Laffer Tengler Investments: My first pick is Goldman Sachs, which has kind of been left behind in the rally this year. It's got a 2.1% yield. They just raised the quarterly dividend about 25% to $5 a share, and we think it's taken a pause because there has been some uncertainty around IPOs and the trading revenues weren't that great last quarter. We do think they are going to benefit from the upcoming wave in IPOs, and aside from the fees, they will also have the potential to snag those customers as future wealth clients.

Starbucks is yielding about 2.6%. The dividend growth has slowed some during the company's turnaround, but we think it will continue to grow at a pretty decent pace. CEO Brian Niccol is a turnaround artist; we made a lot of money on Chipotle with him, and so when he moved to Starbucks, we reinitiated our position in some of our strategies and added to it materially.

My last pick is Nvidia. It's a half of 1% yield. But they raised the dividend 25-fold in June, and they announced plans to return 50% or more of free cash flow to shareholders going forward. We owned it in growth and added it to our value portfolio at the beginning of the summer and have added to it steadily since then. You're getting growth at a very reasonable price. CEO Jensen Huang is a leader in the AI space, and they claim they are focused on releasing useful and safe products. He's not a fearmonger like maybe what we got last week. And [Nvidia's] purchase of [open-source AI platform] Hugging Face, I think, is very important.

Philip Blancato, chief market strategist, Osaic: BP is yielding 4.47% right now, which is obviously highly attractive. The company's generating around $11 billion in free cash flow. They've been paying down their debt fairly well and have solid earnings growth, so while oil prices may come back down by an estimated 23%, the dividend is insulated.

My second pick is Verizon, with a 5.66% dividend. This space is ripe for disruption with what's happening with Starlink and alternative means of communication. But Verizon still has the highest user base in the country. Their adjusted [earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization are] almost $14 billion, which is quite incredible. Earnings per share increased over 7%. They're only trading at 91/2 times earnings, while the market's trading near 20. So you can buy something that's 50% cheaper than the market, and you get a 5.6% dividend. The wireless market is mature, and you wouldn't expect exponential growth here, which again means you have an insulated dividend.

My third pick is Kraft Heinz. When you open your fridge, what do you see? Something by Kraft. It's paying a 6.5% dividend. The company is interesting because its market share improved by almost 36% this year. Their organic sales in places like emerging markets are increasing by around 8.5%. And you don't have a balance sheet that's in any way concerning. They've got a ton of free cash flow. They generated $1.6 billion in free cash flow alone, an incredible number, while paying $949 million worth of dividend, so they don't have an issue here at all. Their earnings-per-share growth for 2026 fell about 20%, but that was due to a little restructuring as well as a new product lineup and paying down a bunch of debt, so I'm not terribly concerned.

Andrew Almeida, director of investment services, XYPN Invest: If you're leaning into growth, Fastenal is a name I think people should be excited about. It pays a 2% dividend, but in terms of quality, Fastenal is in the center of the industrial sector here in America. About 90% of their revenue comes from the U.S. It fits very well into the growth story of onshoring, as well as the data center buildout for AI. Fastenal is your go-to for fasteners, parts and hardware that goes into construction. The company has very little debt and increasing cash flows. Those two metrics are really important for me.

I also like Kimberly-Clark, which is similar; it's reducing its debt and increasing operating cash flow. And when things get tough around the world, people are still buying toilet paper. They have a strong hold on the adult incontinence sector, with an aging population. I believe they're second in diapers for babies. Kimberly-Clark has a much juicier dividend yield than Fastenal, about 5%. Finally, in our income strategy here-we call it XYPN Income Plus-we use the Schwab US Dividend Equity ETF. It has a very low expense ratio and a 3% yield, and it really focuses on those fundamental qualities I was speaking about.

Seth Hickle, chief investment officer, Mindset Wealth Management: We're not always trying to find the highest yield; we're trying to find businesses capable of making today's dividends look small five or 10 years from now. One is Morgan Stanley, which has a modest dividend yield of approximately 2.25%. Morgan Stanley recently increased its dividend by 15%, and at the same time they authorized a $20 billion share repurchase program. When we look at a stock, we're checking whether they are doing any share repurchases or reducing debt. Buybacks give you the ability to increase your ownership without buying more shares, and I think that's often overlooked by dividend investors. This is not the Morgan Stanley of the past. It's transformed itself from a transactional Wall Street business into a compounding asset-gathering machine.

The next one has an even lower dividend yield: Cummins is yielding only 1.68%, however we think they have the ability to grow that dividend going forward. In fact, they've increased it for 17 consecutive years. The company is best known for truck engines, but increasingly it's no longer just a truck engine story, it's a power-generation company. Data centers in particular are helping drive demand for their products. We think the AI buildout still has a lot of runway and Cummins is going to benefit from that need for power.

Finally, Microchip Technology is paying a little over 2.5%. Its chips are embedded into everything from automobiles to aerospace and defense, to communications and increasingly to data-center infrastructure. I'm particularly excited about industrial automation, which I think will be a big theme going forward as we build out data centers and robots. I think you'll see demand for these less-sophisticated chips to control robot arms or temperatures or the movement and light sensors in tomorrow's factories. It's got really good cash flow, and it doesn't have to compete with the Nvidias and AMDs to benefit from AI. The stock is about 30% off its recent highs, and it's an attractive way to get exposure to the AI buildout while collecting coupons along the way.

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