Dividends the best reason to own the S&P 500?

Dividends “might be the best reason to own the S&P 500,” according to Savita Subramanian, Bank of America Corp.’s chief U.S. equity strategist. Stocks are costly enough relative to earnings to suggest the index will decline at a 0.5% annual rate in the next 10 years, Subramanian wrote in a report Monday. If that happens, investors would still come out ahead because of payouts, she wrote. More than half of the S&P 500’s total return since 1988 has come from dividends, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. “That percentage could be closer to 100% over the next decade,” she wrote.