“He hasn’t picked up a basketball since…” My fellow dad winced slightly, and I completed the sentence for him.

“Since last season.”

He shrugged.

“I get it,” I admitted. “He’s a seasonal hooper.”

My friend’s son has a body built for basketball. Tall. Loooooong arms.

He’s athletic, too. There’s just one thing holding him back: He doesn’t actually care about the sport of basketball. I know this because I’ve coached him (let’s call him Seasonal) since he was seven.

Every November, Seasonal shows up with his friends. He puts forth a somewhere-between-minimal-and-reasonable effort in practices. In games he has more fun and works harder.… Read more

It’s an app only Silicon Valley could come up with.

One of its key selling points? It can help users root out the monthly subscriptions they signed up for and forgot about—and cancel them.

I’m talking about Muse, the AI agent Meta Platforms (META) launched last month. While Muse offers a free version (with a usage limit), it also offers—get this—a paid monthly plan.

Which raises the question: If you don’t use it enough, will Muse suggest canceling itself?

Not likely.

But that didn’t stop the (reliably) skittish mainstream crowd from doing what they always seem to when the threat of AI disruption rears its head: sell.… Read more

Our favorite 9.5% dividends are on sale, and very few investors realize it.

It’s a striking situation because a payout that size handily beats a 10-year Treasury. Sure, the 10-year pays about 5% now. And it’ll pay you that for a decade, until you get your principal back.

But that’s still only a bit more than half of what these 9.5% payers—called closed-end funds (CEFs)—pay on average. Plus, unlike a Treasury, we can buy these funds’ portfolios for less than they’re actually worth, putting the potential for big upside on the table, too.

In fact, because so many investors are currently dazzled by those Treasury yields, we have a unique chance to buy our favorite CEFs at an unusually deep 7.8% average discount (more on that in a moment).… Read more

Every now and then, I’ll field a reader letter asking me what’s more important: dividends or growth?

My answer?

Stock pundits have dogged first-level investors with this false dilemma for decades. They love to sort the world into neat piles for their hot takes, and they’ve decided that companies can either pay us or their R&D teams, but not both.

I could drive a truck through the hole in that logic—and I will.

Then, I’m going to highlight seven dividend stocks that I expect to announce hikes to their cash distributions over the next few months. That includes five companies paying us high yields of up to 11%, as well as a pair of companies that doubled their dividends last year.… Read more

Let’s go ahead and break down a recent “win” at my CEF Insider service: an unloved fund that handed us a 48% total return in 10 months!

Why? Because this call went our way for plenty of reasons—and we can take those reasons and “convert” them to strategies that can give us the kind of portfolio we all want: one that delivers healthy dividend income and strong price upside. 

The fund in question: the Columbia Seligman Premium Technology Growth Fund (STK), which returned that 48% from our buy call in the November 2025 CEF Insider to our sell in the recently released September issue.… Read more

I’m hearing a lot from subscribers who are worried about rising rates. I get it. If you’re watching the financial news, it’s all they are talking about. And if you watch your portfolio (too?) closely, you see that the prices of your bond funds are declining.

Which, like, defeats the point of bonds. We’re here for the yield and not to give back our dividends via capital losses.

Bond prices fall as rates rise because, even if the bonds a fund owns are perfectly fine (paying their coupons on schedule), the value declines. Who wants to buy an old bond paying 3% if newer bonds pay more?… Read more

We contrarians love it when the crowd mislabels a stock and tosses it overboard. We really love it when this happens to the same stock twice!

Today we’re going to look at a perfect example: an 8.3%-paying closed-end fund (CEF) most people treat as a bond proxy. But it’s much more than that.

That’s strike one for the mainstream crowd. And it’s the first part of our setup here.

Next, when investors aren’t slapping that label on this fund, they’re mistakenly referring to it as a utility fund.

Strike two!

When a situation like this crops up, we essentially get a deal on top of a deal.… Read more

Today I want to talk about something we don’t touch on very often in these columns: an obscure (yet highly profitable) situation called a “tender offer.”

I know the name sounds a bit stiff. But if one comes along when you hold a closed-end fund (CEF)—particularly a CEF you bought when it was particularly oversold—wow.

You can find yourself sitting on a fast gain as well as a high dividend payout (as I write this, the average CEF yields around 9%).

As we’ll see in the case of one CEF below, a tender offer can take a fund purchased at an 11.5% discount and let the shareholder cash in a chunk of their holding at nearly full value.… Read more

If you like dividends, check out the discounted cash flows currently available in REIT land. Real estate investment trusts (REITs) have hit the skids in recent months as investors have panicked about the Federal Reserve raising rates. Their worries bring value to us, and today we’re going to highlight five REITs yielding 5.3% to 12.3%.

Now, we income investors are fans of REITs because they pay out most of the profits to us as dividends. Congress created this business structure decades ago, and it included a mandate for dividends—REITs, in exchange for significant federal tax advantages, must dole out at least 90% of their taxable income as distributions back to us.… Read more

This latest shift toward interest rate hikes has sent income investors into a tizzy. That’s great for us, because they’re tossing out one terrific fund kicking out a 7.8% dividend that’s grown.

This smartly run corporate-bond fund is now on the table for 11.9% below the value of its portfolio. That not only positions this fund (a closed-end fund, or CEF, to be exact) for future upside—it helps cushion its portfolio, letting us collect its 7.8% payout in peace as the Fed raises rates.

I know that may sound strange: Usually higher rates are bad for bonds, especially for funds chock full of bonds that pay out “old” rates that may be lower than the “new” interest rates likely to come.… Read more