Author Archive: Brett Owens

Will the stock market finish the year higher or lower?

Who cares?!

Paying attention to “the market” is a hopeless effort in 2025. The explosion of AI implementation plus the policies from Trump 2.0 are creating winners and losers in the economy.

So why buy a basket when we can cherry pick the undervalued front runners?

Even better? Some are cheap! As I write, four big dividend payers (dishing divvies between 5% and 6%) are trading at bargain-basement valuations. Let’s start with the most established of the four-pack, trading for less than its annual sales…

Sonoco Products (SON)
Dividend Yield: 5.2%

Sonoco Products (SON) is a packaging dinosaur turned value play.… Read more

My kids were minting money. One dollar for a regular bookmark. Two bucks for a fancy one!

Designed on the spot at the school bazaar. Took all of ten minutes. Aside from “labor,” the margins were huge. Paper and markers provided by the school.

The storefront? Courtesy of the school. Foot traffic from the local community! A captive, motivated audience!

The venture, Books and Marks (LLC?), also sold used books! Donated by parents and the campus, of course. Perfect margins for the operation.

The only thing that could slow this cash cow was 3pm—the end of the bazaar. Pack up the books, and the extra marks.… Read more

We’ve got a sweet deal on one of my favorite AI dividends (current yield: 7.9%). And it’s not just because of last week’s stock market drop—though that does help.

Truth is, the bargain on this stout fund has been hanging around for a while now. But it’s on borrowed time indeed. We need to make our move.

Forget NVIDIA: This Is the Best AI Buy on the Board 

The AI play in question is the Cohen & Steers Infrastructure Fund (UTF). It’s the closed-end fund (CEF) behind that 7.9% dividend (which, by the way, pays monthly).

In addition to the dividend, we like UTF because it’s a “tollbooth” play on AI.… Read more

Each of my kids collected more than three pounds of candy on Halloween Night. Three-plus pounds! Their efforts were not superhuman by my best late-80s-to-early-90s estimation.

We are going to have these bags until Easter.

The candy hangover was real. Both YMCA basketball games played “the day after” were utter disasters for their dad and coach.

Sugar-high crashes are real. Which is why we are talking “sleep well at night” dividends paying up to 8.6% today.

Don’t be Coach Brett the day after Halloween. If you’re worried about a Wall Street sugar withdrawal, the time to prepare ye ‘ol portfolio is right now.… Read more

We’ve been dividend-hungry lately. Our Wednesday missives have brought 11 income ideas since Labor Day!

It’s a busy week for our brood! If you bought these payers, you have four ex-dividend dates (the dates when the stock trades at a price minus—“ex”—the dividend per share) on deck this week. Plus two pay days!

Income Calendar for This Week

This neat weekly view comes to us courtesy of Income Calendar, our homegrown dividend tracker. We developed IC for serious income investors like yourself. The tool projects every dividend payment with accuracy that is unmatched in the industry.

This calendar beats today’s best AI—it’s custom-made and precision-tuned for dividend stocks.… Read more

Some of our favorite bond funds (yielding 8%+) just took a header. And it’s setting up the best buying opportunity we’ve seen in nearly three years.

We can thank panicked mainstream investors for our shot here.

CEF Investors Are Ultra-Conservative (and Easily Spooked)

This opportunity is coming to us in closed-end funds, which we love for a lot of reasons—not the least of which is the fact that they’re a small corner of the market.

As of the end of 2024, there were just 382 CEFs out there, with $249 billion in assets among them. Compare that to roughly $11 trillion in ETFs, as of the end of June.… Read more

The Fed is cutting, and that’s bullish for preferred stocks and their big payouts. Let’s look at a trio yielding up to 9.8% that will benefit from every ease from Mr. “Dead Man Walking” Jay Powell.

Most vanilla investors know common shares—and stop there. They buy banks like Bank of America (BAC) or Wells Fargo (WFC) by typing “BAC” or “WFC” into their brokerage account.

Financial firms also offer preferred shares with much bigger payouts. All we need to do is keep typing.

Preferreds are part stock, part bond. These hybrids trade on regular exchanges under normal tickers. They pay dividends and represent ownership, but their income stems from “bond” DNA.… Read more

“I don’t have to make and update my goofy spreadsheets anymore!” my man Peter B. from New Hampshire writes.

Tell ‘em, Peter!

We are devoted to retiring on dividends here at Contrarian Outlook. But a little bit of work in retirement is OK. As income investors, we should be able to forecast our income.

Note that I said a little bit of work. Not a lot! I am not interested in fiddling with spreadsheets until the end of time, and neither is my man Peter.

If you’re with us, why not hop aboard the Income Calendar train with Peter and me?… Read more

The 10-year Treasury rate has sunk to around 4%. And we’re going to cash in.

No, we’re not purchasing Uncle Sam’s sorry paper. Instead we’re picking up a basket of ridiculously cheap bonds paying more than 2X the beaten-down payout on the 10-year.

And the lower Sam’s rate falls, the more we profit, since bond prices rise as the 10-year yield, pacesetter for rates on loans of all types, drops. Our play here is through closed-end funds (CEFs) like the two we’ll discuss below, yielding up to 10.3%.

Why Treasury Yields Are On the Mat 

There are lots of reasons floating around in the media about why Treasuries are falling, a “slowing” economy chief among them.… Read more

Wall Street still treats utilities like income relics. Big mistake.

The same wires and substations that power your home now feed NVIDIA’s data centers—and our portfolios. These “boring” utilities are morphing into AI toll collectors, handing us up to 10.4% dividends while vanilla investors chase momentum stocks.

Take Texas, for example. The grid is strained. The population is popping. New residents, factories and AI campuses are all plugging into the state’s aging grid at once. The math is no longer “mathing” and it’s about to get worse. ERCOT projects power demand will jump 62% by 2030—yikes!

And Oncor, the state’s largest utility, believes that is way too conservative.… Read more