Author Archive: Brett Owens

I had just spent my whole paycheck at Whole Foods. My wife was not amused.

“Brett,” she paused and trailed off, a telltale sign that I was in the hot seat.

“You don’t have to buy everything organic. Some stuff…” she searched for words, shaking her head.

I flailed for a life raft: “But isn’t organic good?”

“Some fruits, sure,” she conceded. “And vegetables. But not all of them. Like avocados, and bananas—they have thick skins, so it really doesn’t matter if they are organic or not.”

“And cookies. Cookies are a highly processed food. Why are you bothering with organic?”… Read more

Fed Chair Jay Powell’s overheating money printer has been great for our portfolios—it’s sending our dividend stocks through the roof! But where the heck do we invest new-found gains for further payouts?

I know I don’t have to tell you that this inflated market has clobbered dividend yields (as yields move in opposition to prices), but there are still bargain-priced dividend payers out there, some throwing off recession-proof payouts yielding over 6%!

Last week, we talked about one “Fed-fueled” corner of the market—energy stocks like ExxonMobil (XOM), payer of a gaudy 6% payout itself. It’ll thrive as inflation climbs, driving up oil prices.… Read more

Don’t get me wrong—I love my kids. It’s just that I’ve loved “hidden yields” longer.

What are these long-term affectionate affairs of mine? These under-the-radar dividends require looking at the bigger-picture view of all the cash a company is spending on you and me. Sometimes it means looking past a low current yield and instead focusing on rampant dividend growth that will mean big income down the road.

But sometimes, that simply means looking where everyone isn’t—like five little-known stocks yielding a cool 7% on average that we’ll discuss today.

The Virtue of Hidden Stocks

To understand the power of investing in the relatively unknown, consider this quick story from a good friend of mine:

Used-car prices have skyrocketed over the past few months.… Read more

As dividend yields and interest rates dropped in recent decades, income investors looked for ways to generate cash flow from stocks. Selling (“writing”) covered calls is one strategy that has gained attention.

It is certainly a conservative options strategy that most income investors think they should do. The math is compelling.

Here’s how it works. We would buy a dividend stock like Exxon Mobil (XOM) for its $0.87 per share quarterly payout (a 6% yield). Then we would write a covered call with a “strike” price just above the stock’s current level.

For example, XOM trades below $60 as I write.… Read more

Nice to see our friends over at Barron’s finally catching up to us on the big dividends sitting right under our noses in oil and gas!

It’s almost like the magazine’s writers are sharing a subscription to our Contrarian Income Report service, because the six stocks they cited in an article they ran last week are almost all picks in our portfolio—specifically our “crash ‘n rally” energy bucket.

(It’s not the first time’s Barron’s has shadowed us. In April, they put out a strategy for retiring on dividends, a subject we literally wrote the book on two years ago.)… Read more

The small-cap universe is offering investors one of the most elusive prizes of 2021:

A bargain.

As I recently wrote, Wall Street’s gaze has been fixated on the nearly uninterrupted yearlong rally in large-cap stocks—so much so that they appear to have ignored a full-blown correction in the small-cap Russell 2000.

Your average investor will be jazzed at the prospect of snapping up growth on the cheap, or at least cheaper. The blue-chip indices are overbought by just about every calculable metric, so even a relative bargain is a sight for sore eyes.

But craftier investors like you and I that don’t judge smaller books by their covers know that, if we know just where to look, we can get more than mere growth out of the market’s more diminutive picks.… Read more

If you’re waiting for a pullback to put money to work, look no further than small caps.

Early last week, the S&P stopped the bleeding on a harrowing multi-day 2.9% decline. By midweek, “big cap” investors had recouped more than half of their losses.

Was that it? My guess is yes, that was a wrap on the market’s mini-drama for another month or two.

Our intrepid Federal Reserve continues to print a whole lot of cash, which serves to backstop any pullback. The Fed is still buying $120 billion in bonds per month, which adds up to “real money” after a while—nearly $1.5 trillion annually!… Read more

Stocks are floating higher daily, and that’s prompted a lot of readers to ask me when they should sell a dividend stock and take profits—and when they should let it run.

You’re probably sitting on some nice capital gains these days, too, thanks to the COVID rebound rally, and have asked yourself the same question.

Today I’m going to give you three indicators I always use when making buy/sell decisions for my Hidden Yields dividend-growth advisory. It’s a simple setup that lets a too-often-ignored factor—dividend growth—dictate our next moves.

Buy (and Hang on!) When Dividends Outrun Share Prices

If you’re a regular reader of my columns on Contrarian Outlook, what I’m about to say won’t surprise you: dividend growth is the No.… Read more

These dividends are about to break free from their regulatory shackles. Once the cuffs are off, we’re going to see payout hikes up to 100%.

Even the dividend growth “laggards” in this group are due for 11% and 17% hikes. As these payouts pop, their stock prices may certainly follow.

Here’s why.

For the past decade, income investors have overlooked the big banks. The Great Recession burned a hole in the brain of every retiree who lived to tell about it.

The U.S. Treasury bailed out America’s financial sector with the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which disbursed roughly $427 billion to buy toxic assets from (and even equity in) U.S.… Read more

The market looks like it’s about to fall apart. Which means we contrarians will step in, and smartly bank more dividend for our dollar.

Some of us park our dry powder in cash. Others stash in conservative bond funds to juice a bit more yield out of our savings. Let’s talk about these bonds because this is an ideal time to say goodbye to them (for a while!)

As dividend investors, we are naturally allergic to cash. After all, why leave money in dollars earning nothing when we can move it to a stock or fund yielding something?

As I write our Contrarian Income Report portfolio yields 6.3%.… Read more