The Globe and Mail attempts to identify companies paying sustainable dividends in its Thursday edition. The Globe's Ian Tam writes in the Number Cruncher column that one of the pitfalls of dividend investing is that yield alone can be a deceiving metric. A company with sustainable yields over the long term will need to support dividends with sufficient cash flow and earnings. The payout ratio is a key measure that looks at the percentage of a company's earnings or cash flows being paid to dividends. Companies with high payout ratios (100 per cent or more) are unlikely to sustain dividends in the long term. Mr. Tam looked at the current dividend yield, expected dividend growth (expected annual dividend versus dividends paid over the past four quarters), five-year dividend growth rate, quarterly earnings momentum (latest four quarters earnings versus the same number a quarter ago) and the nine-month price change. Qualifying stocks had a market cap of $1.5-billion, a payout ratio on both earnings and cash flow of less than 80 per cent, and a positive five-year cash-flow growth rate. Mr. Tam's Canadian dividend payers are Cogeco Cable, Genworth MI Canada, National Bank of Canada and BCE.