Author Archive: Brett Owens

Remember Bill Gross? The financial media still quotes him here and there. Otherwise, he’s kicking around on X, tweeting a bit, looking (and flailing) to stay relevant.

A far cry from his previous life! Bill Gross was the man who built PIMCO into the biggest bond shop on planet Earth. He’s kind of a quirky guy—hung out near the beach in Southern California, practiced yoga in his office. A little prickly to work with, but definitely a great mind in the fixed-income space. He built PIMCO by himself, and he got all the best bond deals.

But as the years went by and the company grew, Bill started to weigh on the people he worked with.… Read more

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).

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

“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

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

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

Most people think you can’t time the market. That’s nonsense. Not only is it possible, it’s easy.

That’s a bold claim, I know.

Today I’m going to show you how to do it with far less risk than the average investor would face. The best part? We don’t have to wait for the next panic to put our plan to work. We can start now.

This strategy not only helps shield us in a panic—it leverages market chaos for bigger gains (and a fatter income stream) down the road. That’s in large part because of this plan’s “secret weapon”: dividends. Or more specifically dividend growth.… Read more

Using vanilla websites for your dividend research? Be careful.

Many of these mainstream sites miss the most important payment of the year for “special” dividend companies!

This oversight could have us overlooking thousands of dollars in potential yearly income. And yields up to 14.6%!

Would you believe what this 14.6% payer is listed at on these lame sites? 0.2%. Zero-point-two percent.

Yup. Which is why we contrarians do our research with a focus on special dividends.

Specials uncommon enough that many investors don’t know much (if anything) about them. In short, they’re one-time cash payouts, usually the result of a massive capital boost—say, selling off a piece of the company or delivering blowout annual profits.… Read more

Two dividend cuts in the last two quarters, and we are buying.

Wait. What?

When do we ever chase one dividend cut, let alone two? Let me tell you when, my fellow contrarian!

A Terrible Divvie Trend and We’re In?

Let’s start with the fantastic yield. At 15.3%, FS KKR Capital Corp (FSK) has our attention. That doesn’t mean buy—we don’t chase headline yields around here without doing our homework. But in this case, management is redirecting the money saved from these cuts into share buybacks. 

Which means we’ll likely see price appreciation as shares move closer to fair value.… Read more