Author Archive: Michael Foster

Few people pay much attention to the management team of a closed-end fund (CEF). But it’s becoming a much more critical factor driving CEF upside (and downside!), as well as these funds’ 8%+ dividend payouts.

I was reminded of this recently by a story that’s unfolding in the UK, where two asset-management firms are struggling a bit to hire CEOs. One is Scotland-based abrdn plc (SLFPF), whose shares have risen just 2.6% annually in the US on average over the last decade.

Compare that to a roughly 10% average year-to-date return enjoyed by the other major asset managers abrdn is competing with, and you get a good idea of what’s happening here: abrdn isn’t doing well enough to attract the best talent.… Read more

What if I told you I’ve found a way to get $1,000 in dividends every single month—and you only need to invest $146,364 to get it?

There’s more, too, because this $1,000 monthly income stream comes from:

• Regular stocks: What I’m about to show you is based on stocks you likely hold now. I’m talking blue chips like NVIDIA (NVDA), Microsoft (MSFT) and Walmart (WMT). The key is to buy these stocks through a special vehicle called …

• A closed-end fund (CEF). These ridiculously overlooked funds hold the same assets as ultra-popular ETFs but yield a lot more—8.2% on average.

At my CEF Insider service, we’ve been bullish on corporate bonds (especially corporate bond–focused closed-end funds yielding 8%+) for a long time now.

We remain so, because we’ve got a nice “goldilocks” setup for these funds right now:

1. The US economy, while not booming at a rate that makes everyone happy, has steadily improved since the pandemic, prompting inflation to slow but remain elevated.
2. The Federal Reserve, seeing this, is getting set to lower interest rates in late 2024, or possibly at some point next year.

These are both bullish signs for corporate bonds—and the closed-end funds that hold them. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you they were hit hard in 2022, resulting in an array of bargains.… Read more

This levitating stock market has brought back worries about a crash (and a recession). I know, I know. We’ve been hearing that doomsday forecast for what feels like forever—and nothing of the sort has come to pass.

But a recession will eventually show up. We just don’t know when. In the meantime, stocks could keep drifting higher.

We do not want to miss out on that. But we do want to pay special attention to assets beyond stocks now (and minimize the amount we have sitting in cash, by the way, which is getting eaten up by still-hot inflation).

This is where corporate bonds (many of which are oversold) enter the scene, particularly bond-focused closed-end funds (CEFs), many of which yield well over 8%.… Read more

Closed-end funds (CEFs)—our favorite 8%+ yielding investments—have a new (and popular!) fan. And he’s making a big move I see sending CEF prices higher.

Bill Ackman Discovers What We’ve Known for Years

I’m talking about Bill Ackman, one of the best-known activist investors out there. You’ve probably seen the head of Pershing Square Capital Management, a hedge fund with $18.3 billion in assets, in the media. He’s a regular commentator.

Ackman has scored some big wins in his career, such as his 2005 investment in The Wendy’s Co. (WEN). But he’s probably better known for his dramatic misses, like his losing bid to change the board of directors at Target Corp.… Read more

Hedge funds have a big problem: They can’t beat the market anymore.

If you read the press, you’ll see a lot of concern over this. If hedge funds aren’t cutting staff, they’re struggling to find talent to try to boost their returns. Moreover, the industry mostly keeps shuffling people within its ranks, undercutting the stability needed to make outperformance last.

So it’s kind of strange that hedge funds are managing more money than ever. The industry was managing $1 trillion in the mid-2000s, a milestone at the time. But now hedge funds are managing more than $4 trillion globally. And they’re still growing.… Read more

I spend a lot of time parsing the latest economic data before recommending funds in our monthly CEF Insider service. And while the business press almost always leads with fear when it comes to the economy, the real numbers tell us something else entirely.

Case in point: The three little-discussed economic stats we’re going to dissect today. Taken together, they tell us that now is a great time to buy stocks.

But to make the most of the shifts they foretell in the economy, 8%+ yielding closed-end funds (CEFs) are a far better pickup.

Here are the three factors I’m talking about (in order of importance):

1. American incomes are still growing.

There are three very clear signs the stock-market bull will keep stampeding. Let’s dive into them, then talk about two discounted funds set to ride those gains (and pay us rich dividends up to 11.4% in the process).

Bullish Signal #1: The US Worker is Strong

There’s a lot of pessimism about the US economy out there, even though it’s doing well. We’ve discussed why this is before—it’s ultimately due to the media getting more pessimistic—but this chart proves the point.

Since the Federal Reserve started tracking workers’ average weekly earnings in 2006, they’ve risen at a steady rate of about 2.6% annualized from then to 2020.… Read more

As a contrarian dividend investor, I’ve always looked to buy when media-driven worries run directly counter to the data.

And these days, the media is more negative than it’s ever been, despite the data showing the economy is performing well. Today we’re going to exploit that divide and look at an overly discounted, 6.9% dividend that’s nicely positioned to profit from it.

Media and Experts Distort Their Real Views All the Time 

What I’m really talking about here is the so-called “vibecession,” we discussed a few months ago—the feeling that we’re in a recession even though the data says the economy is performing well.… Read more

Closed-end funds (CEFs) are my No. 1 income plays for a reason that goes beyond their huge dividends: We can tap these off-the-radar (for now!) funds for big price gains, too.

We do this in my CEF Insider service using a time-tested CEF tactic: Buy CEFs trading at discounts to net asset value (NAV, or the value of their portfolios), then sell them at par or, better yet, a premium.

This isn’t rocket science: We’re following the oldest investor play there is: Buy low and sell high! To do it, we’re letting the discount to NAV, a critical CEF metric, be our guide.… Read more