If this manic market is making you queasy, I get it. So let’s talk about the perfect dividend payers for this volatility.

Those would be two funds throwing off 8%+ payouts we can collect in peace. And because both are cheap (for now), they have a higher “floor” on pullbacks than the S&P 500 does.

They’re both covered-call funds, and they’re built for market “tantrums” because:

• They offer 8%+ dividends that get us through a pullback without having to sell shares to get the cash we need.
• They hold well-known stocks: These funds hold familiar big caps with a twist: They “overlay” a portion of their portfolios with an option strategy that does best when uncertainty is high (more on that below).

The stunning thing about this year’s stock-market rally is that much of it has come in just the last couple of months.

That’s especially the case in tech: The NASDAQ has returned 33% just since March 30, as of this writing. The tech benchmark Vanguard Information Technology Index Fund (VGT) has done even better, spiking 48%.

That surge has, naturally, raised some concern. After all, isn’t the job market slowing? And aren’t inflation and interest rates staying relatively high?

Those worries are valid, of course, but the fact is that over time, stocks tend to track back to corporate earnings and sales growth, and both are surging.… Read more

Small-cap stocks are the cardiac kids of the market. They can bring high risk, and with that high risk can come high reward. For the first half of the 2020s, the reward hasn’t been there—but that’s beginning to change this year. And today, we’re going to discuss five small caps paying between 6.5% and 15.3% in dividends.

Small caps have lagged over the last 10-year period. Large caps outperformed them handily from 2016 to 2020, and then again from 2020 to 2025. But you can see in the chart below that we now have a turn—small caps have outperformed large caps year-to-date by a margin of 16% to 11%.… Read more

One of the best things about high-yielding closed-end funds (CEFs) is that they can post big gains and be strong bargains at the same time.

That’s a tougher circle to square with stocks: It’s hard to argue, for example, that NVIDIA (NVDA) and Apple (AAPL) are “cheap” now, given the strong runs they’ve been on.

But a single CEF can (and regularly does) offer both growth and value. In fact, it’s something we love to see, because it shows a fund is already rising, thanks to the momentum of its underlying portfolio (referred to as its “net asset value,” or NAV, in CEF-speak).… Read more

“Dad?”

The question came from two seats to my left. I leaned over and looked into my oldest daughter’s inquisitive eyes.

“Bolte is better than Judge?”

She asked it with a look of pure disbelief. A kid who’d just made a discovery but couldn’t believe her conclusion.

Last Friday night, my daughter had spent the first couple of innings parsing the center-field scoreboard, which lists each team’s batting averages. Henry Bolte, the Athletics’ 22-year-old rookie, had just pushed his average over .300. The shiny number jumped off the big screen at her, especially after I’d mentioned an inning earlier that hitting .300 is good.… Read more

Inflation forever?

The fear has taken root seemingly everywhere: the media, the bond market, the futures market. They’ve all bought into the idea that scorching price hikes (and high interest rates) are here to stay.

If you’re like me, my fellow contrarian, you’re paying attention—but you also know something else about times like these: When everyone expects something to happen, something else usually does.

That’s what I want to talk to you about today. Because all the data I’m watching tells me the crowd is wrong: It’s deflation, not inflation they should be focused on.

Falling rates, not rising rates.… Read more

The stock market is roaring, and according to the media, it’s all because of AI.

But is that really true?

Because if it is, there must be other corners of the market, beyond tech, that are being overlooked. And that’s where we contrarians want to go hunting for high, steady (and cheap!) dividends.

Let’s break this question down, starting from a 50,000-foot view, then zeroing in on an ignored 8.1%-yielding fund with strong upside as investors come to realize its true value.

Source: State Street Investment Management

This table is a great starting point—a kind of roadmap to where the cheapest stocks in the S&P 500 might be hiding out.… Read more

We contrarians always need to remain a step ahead. That means to find the best deals and yields, we need to be where everyone else isn’t (yet).

Right now, that means we’re taking a trip to the bank—to collect up to 12.3% annually in dividend checks.

Financials are in the tank. They are the dogs of 2026 thus far. A proposed national cap on credit card interest rates spooked mega-banks like Citigroup (C) and integrated card companies like Capital One Financial (COF). Then, advances in artificial intelligence sent shockwaves throughout the software industry, stoking a panic among private lenders like business development companies (BDCs) as well as traditional banks.… Read more

Let me take you back to April 2001 for a second. Because that year brought a key turning point for income investors.

I’m talking about the launch of the SPDR Dow Jones REIT ETF (RWR). The fund rolled down the skids with a simple mission: Give investors an easy way to buy a diversified basket of real estate investment trusts (a.k.a. REITs) in one low-cost index fund.

It was exciting because, back then, REITs had outperformed stocks when their high payouts were reinvested. And their dividend yields were much higher than those of the typical S&P 500 name, too.

Backed by reliable rents, as well as the constant need for space to store and sell things (for businesses), as well as places to live, work and have fun (for individuals), the sense was that demand for real estate would never end.… Read more

Think it’s a good idea to ask ChatGPT to run your retirement portfolio?

(I know that you don’t, my careful contrarian. But we both have friends that are more than tempted to trust the bots! Here are the cautionary numbers that show AI models are not very good at running money.)

A startup called Nof1 recently ran an experiment. It handed $10,000 each to Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok and four other leading AI tools. The humans gave “seed capital” to the bots.

Here’s $10K. You have two weeks to trade US stocks. Make some money. Now GO.

How much do you think each bot turned its initial $10K into?… Read more