Author Archive: Brett Owens

Your next Amazon.com box could be fueling a dividend—and stock price.

Talk about delivery-powered dividend growth! In the US, 3 billion e-commerce packages were delivered in 2020. And its not just Amazon (AMZN).

Brick-and-mortar retailers have finally realized that they must answer Amazon with convenient deliveries. Smart retailers such as Walmart (WMT) and Williams-Sonoma (WSM) have figured out that “omni-channel” (in-store and online) is the future.

They’re the types of companies that will survive the “great reset.”

E-commerce swallowed brick-and-mortar market share over the past decade, making up just 6.4% of retail sales in 2010, but a whopping 15.8% in 2019.… Read more

A “great reset” is underway in our economy. The talking heads bemoan the losers. We contrarians should pay attention to the winners—and their stocks—because that’s where fortunes will be made.

I’ve seen this trend unfolding firsthand. My second software company, which focused on marketing for e-commerce stores, launched a Shopify (SHOP) app in 2013. At the time this was a fledgling platform that helped retailers sell their wares online.

We were a startup ourselves, newly minted a year prior. To the outside world we described ourselves as a “spinoff” from my first software company, to give the feeling of stability. In practice, we were three dreamers working for free to get our company off the ground.… Read more

Ignore anyone who says share splits have no impact on your portfolio (or your dividends!).

They absolutely do set you up for a nice price bump. I’ve seen it time and time again. It’s easy to see why: when a company—especially a top-notch dividend grower—splits its shares, the move draws in folks who’ve been holding off, seeing the pre-split price as too expensive.

Let’s be honest: we’ve all done this. How many times have you avoided a stock because it trades for $300 a share? Or $500 (or whatever your idea of expensive is)? Never mind the really high traders, like Alphabet (GOOGL), at $2,700, or Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A),… Read more

Double-digit dividends are rare. A sky-high yield of 27.2% is an outright income unicorn.

Only in the merry world of closed-end funds (CEFs) would we see such a tale. It’s enabled by talented money managers who, thanks to wide investment mandates, serve as the Willy Wonkas of the CEF factory.

These managers have an endless bag of tricks at their disposal. They can put options to work. They can “double down” on their own bets. They can double, triple and even quadruple the yield on traditional investing strategies, leading to average yields in the high single digits and stretching all the way to 27.2%.… Read more

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