Volatility is the Real Price of Income

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Right now, it's easy to criticize Wall Street. It's not so much a place anymore as it is a target-rich environment. Not that the denizens of Wall Street have done much to immunize themselves from these criticisms.

I want to add one more to the list: Conditioning investors to focus on total return instead of cash returns.

For decades, investors have been keeping score of their investment performance by looking at the total account value, as they have been trained to focus on total account value when investing for retirement through a 401(k), IRA, mutual fund or brokerage account.

A good market rewarded investors with gains and a bad market reduced account values. The total sitting on the front page of the investor's statement is the bottom line. This makes sense since one day this total value will be converted to income producing investments and in the meantime, will serve as an ego boost in good markets.

Today, investors who are close to or in retirement, who normally would be shifting to bonds or safe assets but are being forced to seek needed income through dividend paying stocks, must shift how they are keeping score and look beyond the total account value. The new way to keep score for dividend investors should be the investment income column of the statement.

If you look at monthly or quarterly statements -- many of which represent an advancement in the art of obfuscation -- it's hard to even find the income. The focus is on portfolio value. This is the wrong way to look at things because it causes investors to think about, or worse, actually re-allocate their portfolio, when in many cases they should simply sit still.

As a case in point look at Intel (INTC) . On May 2, INTC shares were trading at $29.27. Currently, they're trading at $23.30, or a decline of about 20%.

What hasn't changed is the cash flow. Intel is still paying the same 84 cents a share. With $5.2 billion in cash and $8.3 billion in short-term and liquid investments, there's a good chance the dividend is secure. In fact INTC has grown its dividend at a compound annual growth rate of nearly 27% since 2002.