Forbes has an interesting article that talks about with portfolio managers from the Alpine Dynamic Dividend Fund who get six dividend payments a year by trading stocks in similar industries. The article also have a few dividend ideas as well as couple of special year end dividend tips. Dividend Mania

Get all the mileage you can out of that favorable 15% rate on dividends--harvest six quarterly dividends per year. The crafty souls at Alpine Woods show how.

Congress slashed the tax rate on dividends four years ago, yet the dividend yield on the S&P 500 remains a stingy 1.75%. Investors who want to wring more cash out of their portfolios have to either sell shares, buy inflation-sensitive bonds--or copy the strategy used by the Alpine Dynamic Dividend Fund.

Dynamic Dividend portfolio managers Jill K. Evans and Kevin Shacknofsky pull seven times the S&P's yield out of stocks with a simple, if labor-intensive, trick. Instead of accepting four quarterly dividends each year, they take six.

This trick involves finding pairs of stocks in the same industry with roughly the same yield. You want to find ones whose payout dates are far enough apart to allow you to swap them so you can capture their dividends. That requires deft maneuvering around the ex-dividend date, the division point that determines whether a payout goes to the previous owner of a share or the new one.

Last year one could have bought Progress Energy in January and held it until early April, just long enough to grab two dividends, with ex-dividend dates of Jan. 10 and Apr. 10. Then one could have swapped into Southern Co., a similar southern public utility, for 61 days to grab another dividend (May 1), then go back to Progress for two more dividends (July 10 and Oct. 10) and return to Southern for one more (Nov. 6). Result: a 7.8% dividend yield from two stocks with stand-alone yields of around 5%.

The Div Guy does not own Progress Energy or Southern Co. at the time of this post.