Investors are always hunting for the next big stock -- the dream stock whose price increases several times over when the market finally discovers it. It's easy to look back and discover the 10 best stocks of the past decade. But I'm more interested in the tools that can help me evaluate tomorrow's greatest companies.

Motley Fool CAPSoffers a variety of resources to aid Fools in finding tomorrow's leaders. Our 140,000-member community is full of investors helping each other beat the market.

We'll enlist CAPS to screen for dividend-paying companies, then get the story behind some of its more highly rated stocks. CAPS' nifty screenerwill help us find stocks with:

Then we'll tap the collective intelligence of our CAPS members to see whether these companies present real opportunities -- or whether the numbers fail to tell the true story.

Opinions with the numbers
Below is a sample of stocks our screen returned. You can run this screen yourself-- remember, though, that your results may differ from ours as the market changes.

Company

Dividend Yield

LT Debt-to-Equity Ratio

CAPS Rating (Out of 5)

Enerplus Resources Fund (NYSE: ERF)

8.8%

0.17

*****

Bristol-Myers Squibb (NYSE: BMY)

5.5%

0.43

*****

Maxim Integrated Products (Nasdaq: MXIM) Continued...