@jsmith116 A simple rejoinder is "Look, the div fund might be a bargain now, but SPY is in a bubble."
You're contrasting a dividend fund over a
1 year period to the US SPY. This is also a 7.7% extreme fund, not a conservative 4% big-cap fund. Comparing apples to rubber chickens.
(edit: oops, not a global fund, but a US fund)
But more importantly, this has nothing to to do with your refutable claim that you have to keep buying and dropping stocks to get dividends. Nonsense. You just get a fund. Or buy big boring stocks that have paid dividends consistently. So it's a non-sequitur.
Over the past decade SCHD has about matched SPY in total returns.
The lesson from this paper is "Don't buy anything with unrealistic growth priced in, especially if it implicitly assumes continuing interest rate and tax cuts." Now it could be that dividend stocks also have unrealistic growth cooked into the price, because SCHD increased its dividends by 6% per year, and those days might be over, just like SPY might not keep going up and up the way it used to. The question is "which one makes
more of dangerous assumptions about continuing growth?"
It's kind of funny how dividend investors get active hostility (downvotes), when in fact their performance was pretty similar over the past boom decade (SCHD +11.62% per annum; SPY +12.63), and we haven't seen a bust decade in a long time.