When the world is burning—as it feels like it is now—it pays to remember the words of Howard Marks, the smartest money manager most people have never heard of.

The essence of Marks’s approach is contrarian thinking. In Chapter 11 of his excellent book, The Most Important Thing: Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor, he writes:

The ultimately most profitable investment actions are by definition contrarian: You’re buying when everyone else is selling (and the price is thus low), or you’re selling when everyone else is buying (and the price is high).

But he admits this isn’t easy: “These actions are lonely and uncomfortable.”… Read more

Imagine a credit fund that yields 15.3% and is built to deliver strong returns in all rate environments. That’s the promise of a closed-end fund (CEF) called the XAI Floating Rate & Alternative Income Trust (XFLT).

But the fund has, unfortunately, not backed that up with strong performance. As we can see in orange below, XFLT has badly lagged the popular S&P 500 index fund (in purple) since its launch in 2017.

A Laggard, Even With a 15.3% Yield

That performance amounts to just a 0.57% annualized total return! That’s less than many of the high-yield savings accounts offered by regional and national banks.… Read more

Why sit around and wait all quarter long for a dividend payment?

Monthly divvies are where the retirement party is at! These income “cheat codes” arrive alongside our bills and recurring expenses. What a concept!

But be careful because some monthly payers don’t pay enough to matter. Take Permian Basin Royalty Trust (PBT), which pays monthly but these divvies add up to just 1.2% annually. Gee, thanks.

$1M Invested in Either Would Pay Under the US Poverty Line

We need monthly payers that are committed to maximizing not just the frequency of shareholder rewards, but the size of the payout.… Read more

Let me take you back a little over six months, to December 2025.

Back then, things looked rough for our favorite high-yield real estate investment trusts (REITs)—and the 8%+ paying closed-end funds (CEFs) that held them.

Nonetheless, I forged ahead with the December issue of CEF Insider, which was bullish on these unloved income investments.

It was very much a contrarian take.

After all, REITs had lagged the S&P 500 in 2025, and there were reasons to think that would continue. This, in fact, had been the story since the dawn of the 2020s. In that time, REITs had faced waves of setbacks: pandemic restrictions, work-from-home, soaring interest rates, and finally the attention-sucking AI trade.… Read more

Do you pay too little in federal taxes?

How about state taxes? Is your yearly tab not enough?

Forty-one out of fifty states levy an income tax. That’s 82% according to my math, so if you’re getting “state taxed” and you want a break on your dividends, read on.

Municipal (“muni”) bonds are often afterthoughts. Their headline yields look modest but remember, they often dish divvies that Uncle Sam can’t touch. Some are even safe from your state governor’s greasy, greedy palms!

Munis are issued by cities and states to fund infrastructure projects. Let’s say a state is building a new highway.… Read more

Here’s what sets us contrarians apart from the herd: We know that every crazy headline that comes across our phones is great news for us.

We welcome the madness and volatility because it lets us buy dips in our favorite dividend growers! Plus, we have an overlooked edge the crowd is clueless about: Our “Dividend Magnet” system for picking dividends that are soaring—and taking their share prices along for the ride.

I’d go so far as to say a soaring dividend is the biggest driver of share-price growth.

When many investors think of growth, they think of aggressive non-payers like Netflix (NFLX), Shopify (SHOP), Tesla (TSLA) or (heaven forbid!),… Read more

At my CEF Insider service, we started 2026 bullish. We still are.

Why? AI, sure. But the real answer is simpler: The data simply tells us that the US economy is stronger than most people think.

Sometimes, admittedly, the data is weaker than we’d like, but no real disasters have appeared. So we’ve kept on our bullish course, continuously adding high-yielding closed-end funds (CEFs) to our portfolio, while taking profits on our holdings from time to time.

With that in mind, and with the halfway point of the year only just behind us, I wanted to bring up one fund that’s performed very well for us indeed, and continues to look strong as we roll into the back half of 2026 (and beyond).… Read more

Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but the Strait of Hormuz is closed once again.

Crude oil jumped 9% Monday on the news, and on cue we have vanilla investors piling into everything and anything with a rig or pipeline attached. It’s an understandable reaction, but we careful contrarians can play this smarter.

Still, the energy sector is cheap after months of investor avoidance, and today we’re going to talk about seven names that pay between 4.8% and 13.9%.

These energy payers dish their dividends with or without a geopolitical crisis.

Let’s look at these seven oil names averaging 8.8% yields right now.… Read more

One of our favorite tech-focused closed-end funds (CEFs) is showing a pattern we love to see. What I’m going to show you below is one of my favorite setups for future gains for us, while we collect strong dividends, too.

The fund in question—the BlackRock Technology and Private Equity Term Trust (BTX)—yields 7.4% as I write this, so we’re getting paid handsomely while we wait for those gains to materialize.

Plus, the performance of this CEF’s underlying portfolio, or its “total NAV return” in CEF-speak, has earned enough over the past 12 months—43.8%, to be exact—to pay that dividend many times over, so the payout looks safe (and is paid monthly, to boot).… Read more

I need to ask your honest opinion, my careful contrarian! Should this reader move on from me?

“I’m 89 years young and active,” Peter wrote. “Don’t need income—only growth.”

(I’m the income guy. Do I have a growth arrow in my quiver, or should this young man look elsewhere to get rich?)

First of all Peter, you’re the man. You’re doing many, many things right to eschew current income at the spry age of 89. Good for you for staying active and for being in a position to still pursue portfolio price gains.

Peter went on to explain that he holds six of my official recommendations.… Read more