The media has been abuzz with fresh fears that the AI “bubble” is finally popping.

These worries, of course, have been around for almost as long as AI itself!

At the heart of the latest panic: semiconductor stocks, which have fallen hard, with the benchmark ETF for the sector, the VanEck Semiconductor ETF (SMH), plunging from an all-time high in late June to a level 11% lower today.

Yikes.

But here’s what we need to keep in mind: At CEF Insider, we’re mainly interested in collecting dividends in the long run. When these short-term panics arrive, we take advantage of them, and set ourselves up for extra upside as we do.… Read more

Riddle me this, my fellow contrarian. This company’s dividend grew 160% in three years. Yet, its stock went nowhere!

Dead money?

Or a dividend grower that was due for a pop?

Let’s discuss the special stocks with the exact same setup today. You may even own one! Is it time to sell? Or back up the truck?

Wall Street suits would take one look at this comatose stock and say it’s “dead money.” That’s how they played it in March 2025 when this “dirty” dividend grower was hiking its payout on deaf ears.

ConocoPhillips (COP) boasted 3-year dividend growth of 160% and 3-year stock growth of -1.7%.… Read more

Here’s something we never hear about: The wonderful things that can happen when a stock “pays us back” in dividends.

It’s a shame more dividend investors don’t consider this, because it really is the “holy grail” for us contrarian income players!

What do I mean by “pays us back”? One way to think about dividends is as a small slice of corporate cash flows handed over to us as cash. Eventually, that cash will exceed, on a per-share basis, the amount we paid for the stock in the first place.

Once that happens, everything else is, well, gravy.

I bring this up now because one of our long-time Contrarian Income Report holdings is about to hit this mark.… Read more

I’m sure you’ve heard about the worries around private credit. They really hit the wall when Blue Owl Capital, a major private lender, put redemption limits on one of its funds earlier this year.

As investors, we must take note when such things happen. But we also need to remember that breathless media coverage of such events creates opportunities. That’s especially true in situations like this, involving a corner of the financial world many people simply don’t understand.

These are just the kind of setups we love to exploit at my CEF Insider service. And this one is handing us an opportunity in regional banks—and in particular, a closed-end fund (CEF) holding such banks, and turning their profits into a growing 6.4% dividend.… Read more

500 out of 500.

Do you know what that is? That, amazingly, is the number of stocks in the S&P 500 that the consensus says should be bought or held today. A perfect 500 out of 500.

Wow, so let’s do some “back of the envelope math.” There are 500 stocks in the index. And, let’s see, 500 should be bought or held. Which leaves…let’s see…zero sells.

Zero!

Meanwhile we have unprecedented business model disruption from the massive AI rollout. Biggest thing since the Internet or maybe even the railroads. Fortunes are being minted and vaporized with equal speed right before our very eyes.… Read more

I’ll cut right to the chase: I think the stock market—and our 8.8%+ yielding closed-end funds (CEFs)—could be on the brink of another spike.

If I’m right, we’ll have last week’s “disappointing” jobs report—which showed a loss of 23,000 positions in July—to thank. (And that 8.8% yield, by the way, isn’t made up: It’s the average payout on all CEFs.)

The stock market’s surprising reaction to that jobs report—it rose in response—also positions one of our CEF Insider tech funds very well indeed, with a deep discount to NAV (around 10.7% as I write this) that’s stair-stepping toward par.

That suggests even more gains are ahead for this powerhouse 7.3%-yielding fund, on top of the 37% total return it’s posted this year.… Read more

Be careful how you buy your bonds. The most popular tickers have four “fatal flaws” that’ll doom you to underperformance at best, or at worst leave you hanging in the event of a market meltdown!

Let’s pick on the widely followed and owned iShares iBoxx High Yield Corporate Bond ETF (HYG) as an example. It has attracted nearly $18 billion in assets because:

1. It’s convenient and as easy to buy as a stock.
2. It’s diversified (for better or worse, as we’ll see shortly) with 1,333 individual holdings.
3. It pays well, at nearly 6% today.

The accessibility of funds like HYG appears cute and comfortable enough.… Read more

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