“Let me get this straight. You haven’t been doing these live chats… live?”

This was the final question yours truly would ever pose to a human support person. Nine months ago, I realized our main customer service “live chat” agent for my software company wasn’t doing his job in real time.

He would log on twice a day and bang out second-rate replies to the messages that had accrued via our website. Rinse and repeat. He had a good gig going until I dropped in.

My original plans were to replace him with another support person. Instead, I spent a few hours the following weekend “training” an AI model to handle customer service replies.… Read more

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (BBB) is now law—and there’s one contrarian move we can make now to profit from it.

I’m not talking about shorting 10-year Treasuries (though that might work, given the inflationary policies “baked in” here!).

Instead we’re going long—on American oil and gas. But we’re not looking at producers. We’re going with pipeline operators like Kinder Morgan (KMI), a holding in our Hidden Yields dividend-growth service, to ride the $3 trillion in stimulus the BBB is about to set loose.

Why? Two reasons:

1. Strong dividends: KMI pays a 4.2% dividend that grows every year, and …
2. We get a hedge on oil and gas prices: Most of KMI’s contracts are either “take-or-pay,” under which users are on the hook for the full fee no matter how much product they pump, or “fee-based,” with rates that are fixed no matter what oil and gas prices do.

With stocks levitating higher, you just might be starting to peek at other investment ideas (bonds? REITs?) to spread out your risk and, most importantly, boost your dividends.

It’s always a smart strategy, and especially so now. We ran through an easy way to diversify while grabbing yourself a healthy 7.9% payout in last Thursday’s article (click here to catch up if you missed it).

“Munis” Cut Your Taxes, Boost Your Payouts—But Timing Matters

Which brings me to my favorite income plays, closed-end funds (CEFs), and in particular those that hold municipal bonds. (“Munis” are issued by state and local governments to fund infrastructure projects.… Read more

The last bargains on the big board? Discounted closed-end funds (CEFs).

CEFs are often the “last stop” for dividend deals. We are talking about an inefficient corner of the income universe, which is just great for us contrarians—we love the discounts.

And these funds can trade for less than “fair value” for months and even years on end. When the markets washed out in April, these CEFs were discarded by their vanilla dividend owners. Let’s pick up the pieces for up to 12% off, or 88 cents on the dollar. And in the process secure yields up to 9.7%.

Nuveen Dow 30 Dynamic Overwrite Fund (DIAX)
Distribution Rate: 8.4%

We’ll start with the Nuveen Dow 30 Dynamic Overwrite Fund (DIAX), an example of a strategy that thrives in CEF land: covered calls.… Read more

Tariffs. Inflation. Soaring interest rates. The financial press, of course, blares about all of them—day in and day out.

Truth is, they have to do this to get your attention. But it’s also unhealthy to your portfolio, as investing based on the headlines leads to traps like trading too much, selling at the bottom and buying at the top.

(This, as members know, is why we focus on high-yield closed-end funds and aim to hold long term. This lets us tune out the headlines and “automatically” reinvest our 8%+ average payouts in corners of our portfolio that are on sale at any given time.… Read more

A nifty dividend duo—with yields of 9% and 12%—is ready for takeoff. Thanks to Uncle Sam’s spending bender coinciding with the rise of the machines.

Big tech stocks are about to remind Wall Street why it fell in love with these shares in the first place. Think you’ve seen a tech bubble before? Just wait until tech firms report earnings later this month!

These companies are growing sales and profits by deploying robots instead of hiring humans. Their AI-driven tools are faster, more scalable, and much cheaper than carbon-based labor. Cost savings are dropping straight to tech bottom lines.

Expect proof of trend as the Nasdaq’s increasingly machine-driven companies report banner earnings in the coming weeks.… Read more

This “growth without hiring” trend we’ve been talking about these past few weeks is en fuego: Microsoft (MSFT) is the latest to say it’s cutting expensive humans, announcing last week that it will lay off 9,000 people.

That comes on top of 6,000 cuts in May. Six thousand here, 9,000 there. As they say, pretty soon you’re talking about serious numbers!

The tech bros aren’t saying it out loud—though some, like Amazon.com (AMZN) CEO Andy Jassy, are (he could barely conceal his enthusiasm when discussing this seismic shift from expensive humans to cheaper machines)—but AI is clearly “at work” in Big Tech, pushing out humans by the thousands.… Read more

Maybe you’ve heard some variation on this fear in the last few years:

A lot of American companies are going to default on their debts.

I know I have. Frankly, pushing back on it was among the most contrarian calls I’ve made during my investment career. And it was tough to stick with. I’ve been in plenty of conversations with bankers, hedge fund managers and other Wall Street types who thought a default wave was right around the corner.

But it wasn’t. And it isn’t now—even though the fear remains. And we’re going to tap this ongoing misconception for a cheap (but getting less cheap every day) 8.6% dividend in just a second.… Read more

ADP showed us that the private sector is now shedding jobs. That’s bad for workers—but it’s great news for earnings season.

Slowing employment means easing wage pressures and lower inflation. It also brings better profit margins and, our favorite of all, dividend hikes. Let’s talk about five firms that recently raised their payouts 25% to 400%

Are these one-hit wonders or will AI-driven savings make these dividend hike sequels even better?

Profit growth brings dividend growth. Which then translates to share-price gains. That’s the idea behind my “Dividend Magnet” strategy. When a company announces that it’s going to pay more for the foreseeable future, it’s a bold statement.… Read more

Well, that didn’t last long.

A few months ago, all we heard from the mainstream media is that the “sell America” trend was going to stick around for a long time.

Nowadays, we’re still hearing that. But one corner of the market—closed-end funds (CEFs)—is telling us something interesting: That investors are starting to turn their attention back to the US.

That’s given us an opportunity to front-run this quiet shift now, while it’s still early, with some high-yield CEFs trading at attractive discounts. In a second, I’ll walk you through the signal we’re getting from two of the biggest US-focused CEFs—one holding stocks, the other corporate bonds.… Read more