I have one IRA portfolio…
Seems to me that the dividend income doesn’t do me any good. Doesn’t lower the risk, since the dividend is used to immediately buy more shares.
Since this is an IRA, it doesn’t matter whether you are paid a dividend or if you instead are provided unrealized capital gains - it is all taxed as income.
And yes, it does lower your risk if you increase (or perhaps more accurately, retain) your allocation to fixed income vs increase your allocation to equities. That doesn’t make it necessarily the preferred investment but fixed income in general is lower risk than equities.
Also, since this is an IRA with auto-reinvesting of dividends, it would probably be easier to sell and buy units/$ at a future date than it would be to try and invest the piddly amount of cash you might accumulate monthly.