Look, we contrarians always welcome a market rally like this one. But it does make our hunt for yield harder.

I mean, the S&P 500’s surge has ground down the index’s average yield to levels not seen since the 1800s!

Right now, the go-to index fund, the State Street SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY) yields 0.98%. So you’d be pulling in a pathetic $9,800 on a million bucks invested. To get a liveable $50k in income, you’d need to invest $5 million.

Yikes!

Clearly, we need to widen our “strike zone,” and look beyond dividend yield to get the dividend cash we demand.… Read more

At my CEF Insider service, we’ve long seen high-yield bonds as a critical part of our portfolio. And I’ve got a bond fund for you today that:

1. Has crushed stocks in the last five years (which is pretty well unheard of for a fund holding corporate bonds).
2. Generates a high, stable yield (I’m talking 7.5% payouts here, with the odd special dividend thrown in).
3. Is cheap, with a discount to net asset value (NAV, or the value of its underlying portfolio) of 8.8%. And I see that discount resuming its march toward par, putting upside pressure on the fund’s price as it does.

We need to talk about four of the cheapest dividend payers on the planet. I’m talking about blue-light bargain valuations and, our favorite, serious high yields!

These four pay from 4.7% to a terrific 12.6%. Yet the Wall Street suits have left them for dead, on the side of the road (or Street, if you will!). Which is fine with us careful contrarians. We’ll sort through the sale rack.

Let’s start with a telecom that stays cheap yet keeps paying us nearly 5% because this divvie perennially finds its way into the suits’ doghouse.

AT&T (T)
Dividend Yield: 4.7%

AT&T (T) is one of telecom’s “Big Three” alongside competitors Verizon (VZ) and T-Mobile US (TMUS).… Read more

The recent blowup at Situational Awareness, a hedge fund run by a so-called AI “whiz kid,” tells us a lot about the mindset of the mainstream crowd these days—and what we need to do to avoid falling victim to it.

In fact, the same selloff that broke Situational Awareness put one of our favorite tech CEFs on sale. More than that: This steady payer is trading near discount levels not seen in more than a decade.

An AI Fund Built on Hype and Debt

After working at OpenAI (and being fired in April 2024), Leopold Aschenbrenner wrote an essay called “Situational Awareness” that got a lot of attention and later became the name of his hedge fund.… Read more

You ever buy a stock, watch it go up quickly, feel like a genius…only to watch it top out and take back some of your gains…and then all of them? It’s a—let’s admit it—stupid feeling.

The winner, now a big fat loser. Why didn’t I take the money and run!

“Be patient,” they say. “You’re here for the dividend. The stock will come back.” Well, first, who the heck are they? And second, why should patience be required? It was a fast winner. Now it’s a big fat loser!

Well, my careful contrarian, I ran the numbers earlier this year.… Read more

Kevin Warsh is talking tough on inflation. The bond market is calling BS.

Whenever the Fed and the bond market face off, it pays to remember the words of “Ragin’ Cajun” James Carville:

“I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the President or the Pope or a .400 baseball hitter. But now I would want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.”

Until this fight gets straightened out, we’re in for some turbulence.

We contrarians are here for it. When markets roil, the crowd tosses perfectly good payers over the side.… Read more

A Chinese startup is disrupting the AI world. Middle East worries are spiking oil.

These are the two biggest worries rocking markets now. And if you’re like me, you’re feeling a sense of déjà vu.

Let me take you back to February, when talk of a fight between Iran on one side and America and Israel on the other caused oil to soar and markets to sell off. Right now, that story is repeating (as it has many times as the conflict has ebbed and flowed).

On the AI side, variations of this story have been coming and going since early 2025, when a Chinese company created DeepSeek, a powerful, energy-efficient AI model.… Read more

Hey, remember tariffs? Well, they’re baaaaaaaack!

As of last week, new import taxes of 10% to 12.5% were slapped on 60 trading partners. This covers a cool 99.4% of everything that America buys abroad. Let’s pile the tariff return on top of the recent Fed news and tensions that keep rolling in the Middle East. There’s obviously plenty of bricks in the current Wall Street wall of worry for this stock market to climb.

This climb, however, is no problem for “low drama” dividends like these. I’m talking about five companies yielding between 4.9% and, get this, 11.5%! No matter the headlines these payouts keep flowing.… Read more

Most investors love to talk about their winners. That’s understandable, but it’s still a shame, because losing investments can often teach us a lot more.

That’s true no matter what you invest in: stocks, real estate—and, yes, 8%+ paying closed-end funds (CEFs), our favorite income plays.

With that in mind, let’s look at three of the worst-performing CEFs of 2026 to see what they got wrong and how we can avoid holding such funds in the future.

I haven’t chosen this trio at random; these three CEFs are the worst performers on the market so far and have market caps above $250 million.… Read more

$500K can be enough money to retire on. Even as early as age 50!

The trick is to convert the pile of cash into cash flow that can pay the bills. I’m talking about $42,839.91 per year in dividend income on that nest egg, thanks to 8%+ average yields.

These are passive payouts that show up every quarter or, in many cases, every month.

Meanwhile, we keep that $500K nest egg intact. Or, better yet, grind that principal higher steadily and safely.

Got more in your retirement account? Cool—more monthly dividend income for you!

We’ll talk specific stocks, funds and yields in a moment.… Read more