Author Archive: Brett Owens

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

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

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

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

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

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

$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

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