Chin... I am not a fan of the Dogs of the Dow strategy... because the biggest advantage an investor has is to buy when the stock price is attractive and to buy-and-hold.  The Dogs of the Dow strategy aims to buy stocks out of favor but there is no guarantee the price you pay is attractive... and also there is substantial turnover... both of these eat away at expected returns.

We mostly buy large well-known individual dividend stocks... stocks like BAC (Bank of America) and GE (General Electric), two that are currently attractively priced, and we will buy MO (Altria) and PEP (Pepsi) or KO (Coca Cola) some day if their share price is ever attractive.

I am a fan of diversification.  We set a targe of owning the two largest companies with a dividend greater than 2.5% in each major sector.  Not all the companies we have targeted have been cheap enough (in our opinion) to purchase.  But we do own about 20 stocks that consist of about 19% of our portfolio.

We do not own any value funds anymore... having transferred those funds to these stocks over the last three years.  Our portfolio has become more complicated but at the same time, we hardly even noticed the market downturn this year.  We were down 5 or 6% at one point, but currently are showing a positive return for the year.

We retire in 38 months and are confident we can live off the income of our portfolio... this is a very comfortable feeling.

Best
Stats

PS... chin, I have not had time to get back to the Asset Allocation post you started.  I feel guilty as I promised to post something but I have been too busy this week and I see no time for another week or so.  I have not forgotten about it and am not ignoring it.