Earnings and yields, dividends and royalties. They’re what investors are clamoring for into 2023. And who can blame them a year later when the S&P 500 slipped 20% and when six-month and one-year Treasuries are now yielding over 4.7%? After all, analysts’ forecast yields for the S&P 500 as a whole in 2023 are still around 1.8 percent today. But investors need to be careful when looking for additional dividend yields from common stocks. To be useful, dividends must be reliable, immutable. The appeal of some stocks and stocks will become less bright if dividends are cut or worse, eliminated. Think of high dividend payouts as potential yield traps. To find warning signs among the high-payers, CNBC Pro searched the S&P 1500 Index, which includes the S&P 500, Midcap 400, and Smallcap 600 indices. Then we just sifted through. on FactSet through December 22 for stocks with a market value of more than $1 billion, a dividend yield of at least 5%, a debt-to-equity ratio of over 100%, and a dividend payout ratio of at least 5%. cash dividends of less than 3. Finally, we limit our search to companies whose free cash flow analysts expect their free cash flow to decline in 2023 and whose stock declines by at least 20% by 2022. The result is five stocks with dividends as high as 15.2% but not less than 5.5%. The Two Harbors investment watch has the highest yield currently, at 15.2%. The residential mortgage real estate investment trust fell more than 30% in 2022, and its projected free cash flow is estimated by analysts to drop 57% next year. More optimistically, however, its dividend payout ratio stands at a reasonable 2.0. KKR Real Estate Finance Trust, another REIT, offers structured loans that are collateralized by commercial real estate and yields 12.3%. While the dividend payout ratio is only 1.3, KREF also shows the smallest expected drop (-3.4%) in estimated free cash flow among the five stocks. Scotts Miracle-Gro has the lowest yield of the bunch (5.5%), but by far has the highest debt as a percentage of equity. Maybe that’s why Scotts stock is showing its biggest year-to-date drop of about 70%. Scotts and Medical Properties Trust (10.4% yield), a REIT that invests in healthcare facilities, has the lowest dividend payout on screen, at 1.2. Equitrans Midstream, a natural gas pipeline company based in western Pennsylvania, offers a yield of about 9.0% but also has the highest dividend payout ratio, at 2.5.