Author Archive: Brett Owens

Preferred stocks are a little-known dividend secret. Worth knowing, by the way—they can yield up to 9.9%!

These “forgotten cousins” of common stocks can make a dividend portfolio. Plus, the discounts! Today we can buy a basket with some ingredients fetching as little as 89 cents on the dollar.

A quick refresher on preferreds. When a company needs capital, it typically either sells common stock—the AAPL to our Apple, the JPM to our JPMorgan—or bonds. But there is a third option, and plenty of companies use it: preferred stock.

Like common stock, preferreds give you a sliver of ownership in a company, they can improve in price based on the company’s performance, and they pay dividends.… Read more

I was in heaven. One baseball toss away was a man of surreal size, Aaron Judge.

The New York Yankee slugger. All six-foot-seven standing in a minor league ballpark right here in Sacramento’s Sutter Health Park.

My family and I sat second row, right behind the dugout. I’d waited until just four hours before first pitch to buy the tickets. (A contrarian purchasing strategy that usually works because most buyers don’t have the stomach for it. Here once again it paid off with reasonably priced dugout seats to watch the Yanks at a fraction of the price we’d have paid in the Bronx.)… Read more

Few people realize it, but there’s a way to take a “low” dividend yield and “convert” it to a payout four times higher. Maybe even more.

The stocks we need to get this “hidden” payout are hiding in plain sight.  To find them, we need to be on the lookout for three key strengths:

• A growing, and ideally accelerating, dividend.
• A history of share buybacks, and …
• A high “shareholder yield,” which combines the first two points (I’ll come back to that in a second).

Even better if we can find a stock whose share price has fallen behind dividend growth.… Read more

Consumer staples are boring and reliable. And they typically pay generous dividends.

But generous has nothing on these fantastic yields from 5.2% to 11.3%!

Historically, staples have held up better than the broader market during downturns. Lately, however, that hasn’t happened:

Consumer Staples: A Rare Failure to Protect

Uncertainty fueled a staples rally across the first couple months of the year. But when the war in Iran triggered a near-correction in the S&P 500, the sector didn’t just take the same elevator down—they found a faster one.

The rub? The war sent inflation expectations through the roof. Defensive though staples might be, when consumers really start pinching pennies, they shift away from the pricey brand names that anchor this sector and into private-label products from smaller public and even private companies.… Read more

Monthly dividends and panic readings? Now that’s a path to profits.

Two weeks ago, my Contrarian Income Report readers and I were staring at a recent decline in DoubleLine Yield Opportunities Fund (DLY). Buy more, hold or sell? DLY owners were understandably jumpy. Something must be wrong with the bond portfolio itself, right? Why else would it be down?

The bond fund had just registered its deepest panic reading—which I will share with you in a moment—since we’ve owned it. My contrarian gut said buy. Always buy the hysteria. But, I admit, my taste isn’t for everyone.

(“Dad, why are you buying sardines with tomato sauce?”… Read more

I just took a glance at the Fed futures market and, frankly, couldn’t believe what I saw.

These traders don’t see a rate cut from the Fed until July of 2027. And even then, only a bare majority do:

Source: CME Group

C’mon man! That’s 15 months from now.

I know predictions are tough, but from where I sit, this one seems awfully hard to justify.

For one, Trump administration pick Kevin Warsh is likely to be installed as Fed chair long before then, with Jay Powell’s term officially up next month. Sure, Warsh has been hawkish in the past, but over the last few months, he’s been in line with the administration’s wish for lower borrowing costs.… Read more

In three charts, we’ll show why monthly dividends are superior to even blue-chip payers. Plus, we’ll discuss five monthlies that yield between 9.7% and 13.5%.

First, let’s talk about monthly dividend timing. Check out what our monthly cash flow looks like if we invest in five of the market’s largest dividend-paying companies. These are five of the S&P 500’s biggest holdings, and we can find them in just about every major large-cap fund:

Source: Income Calendar

The good news? Every three months, we cash a dividend check.

The bad news? That harvest is followed by two months of crickets.

Let’s compare that dividend calendar with the projections for my five-pack of monthly payers.… Read more

“Adrian, it’s going to Jack. But you have to act like you have the ball.”

My star adjusted his mouthguard and nodded, still breathing heavily.

“Everyone’s gonna follow you.”

I looked around our huddle. Adrian had just motored for a 95-yard touchdown run on our first play from scrimmage—the very first play of our season. Now we were going for the two-point conversion to take the lead.

I knew the defense was dialed in on Adrian. The opposing coach, Jersey Mike, was now ranting and raving like a lunatic. His Eagles had put together a somewhat disjointed but ultimately effective drive in our YMCA contest, eventually scoring a touchdown.… Read more

This market bounce is giving us a rare window to sell our laggards—and snap up stocks that have been unfairly left behind.

When we dump losers, we want do it into strength. And on the flipside, bounces like this often leave strong bargains in their wake.

Let’s start our “rebound rotation” with two blue-chip laggards lots of people own. Then we’ll pivot to two holdings of my Hidden Yields service that are smart, contrarian places to put cash now.

GIS Is a Prime GLP-1 Target

General Mills (GIS) draws a lot of revenue from snacks people eat routinely (and often without thinking much about it), like Bugles, Dunkaroo cookies and high-sugar cereals like Cocoa Puffs, Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Cookie Crisp.… Read more

We contrarians love a good panic. Dividends are on sale!

The closed-end fund (CEF) aisle is where we do our best bargain shopping. Wall Street ignores CEFs, creating obscurity that we feast on. Discounts, mispricings and high yields are here.

Why the bargains? CEFs routinely go on sale. Thanks to their low profiles, supply and demand imbalances routinely disconnect a CEF’s price from its underlying assets.

When the value swings heavily in our favor, we buy.

And we have some dandy discounts now, with some big divvies attached! These five yields have soared to levels between 6.3% and 12.9%.

Plus, they are trading at discounts up to 12%.… Read more