Incorporating top stocks from a variety of sectors can be an effective way to balance out an investment portfolio.

The Global Industry Classification Standard assigns each stock into a market sector to make it easier for investors to compare companies to their peers and track broader market movements.

The system isn't perfect. For example, Amazon ( AMZN 3.12% ) is in the consumer discretionary sector even though its cloud arm, Amazon Web Services, is its most valuable segment -- meaning Amazon is arguably more of a technology company. But overall, the system is useful for achieving portfolio diversification and seeing which sectors are outperforming or underperforming the S&P 500 ( ^GSPC 1.52% ) .

Here are the 11 stocks I would choose if I could only buy one dividend st

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