Author Archive: Michael Foster

At my CEF Insider service, we’ve long seen high-yield bonds as a critical part of our portfolio. And I’ve got a bond fund for you today that:

1. Has crushed stocks in the last five years (which is pretty well unheard of for a fund holding corporate bonds).
2. Generates a high, stable yield (I’m talking 7.5% payouts here, with the odd special dividend thrown in).
3. Is cheap, with a discount to net asset value (NAV, or the value of its underlying portfolio) of 8.8%. And I see that discount resuming its march toward par, putting upside pressure on the fund’s price as it does.

The recent blowup at Situational Awareness, a hedge fund run by a so-called AI “whiz kid,” tells us a lot about the mindset of the mainstream crowd these days—and what we need to do to avoid falling victim to it.

In fact, the same selloff that broke Situational Awareness put one of our favorite tech CEFs on sale. More than that: This steady payer is trading near discount levels not seen in more than a decade.

An AI Fund Built on Hype and Debt

After working at OpenAI (and being fired in April 2024), Leopold Aschenbrenner wrote an essay called “Situational Awareness” that got a lot of attention and later became the name of his hedge fund.… Read more

A Chinese startup is disrupting the AI world. Middle East worries are spiking oil.

These are the two biggest worries rocking markets now. And if you’re like me, you’re feeling a sense of déjà vu.

Let me take you back to February, when talk of a fight between Iran on one side and America and Israel on the other caused oil to soar and markets to sell off. Right now, that story is repeating (as it has many times as the conflict has ebbed and flowed).

On the AI side, variations of this story have been coming and going since early 2025, when a Chinese company created DeepSeek, a powerful, energy-efficient AI model.… Read more

Most investors love to talk about their winners. That’s understandable, but it’s still a shame, because losing investments can often teach us a lot more.

That’s true no matter what you invest in: stocks, real estate—and, yes, 8%+ paying closed-end funds (CEFs), our favorite income plays.

With that in mind, let’s look at three of the worst-performing CEFs of 2026 to see what they got wrong and how we can avoid holding such funds in the future.

I haven’t chosen this trio at random; these three CEFs are the worst performers on the market so far and have market caps above $250 million.… Read more

Imagine a credit fund that yields 15.3% and is built to deliver strong returns in all rate environments. That’s the promise of a closed-end fund (CEF) called the XAI Floating Rate & Alternative Income Trust (XFLT).

But the fund has, unfortunately, not backed that up with strong performance. As we can see in orange below, XFLT has badly lagged the popular S&P 500 index fund (in purple) since its launch in 2017.

A Laggard, Even With a 15.3% Yield

That performance amounts to just a 0.57% annualized total return! That’s less than many of the high-yield savings accounts offered by regional and national banks.… Read more

Let me take you back a little over six months, to December 2025.

Back then, things looked rough for our favorite high-yield real estate investment trusts (REITs)—and the 8%+ paying closed-end funds (CEFs) that held them.

Nonetheless, I forged ahead with the December issue of CEF Insider, which was bullish on these unloved income investments.

It was very much a contrarian take.

After all, REITs had lagged the S&P 500 in 2025, and there were reasons to think that would continue. This, in fact, had been the story since the dawn of the 2020s. In that time, REITs had faced waves of setbacks: pandemic restrictions, work-from-home, soaring interest rates, and finally the attention-sucking AI trade.… Read more

At my CEF Insider service, we started 2026 bullish. We still are.

Why? AI, sure. But the real answer is simpler: The data simply tells us that the US economy is stronger than most people think.

Sometimes, admittedly, the data is weaker than we’d like, but no real disasters have appeared. So we’ve kept on our bullish course, continuously adding high-yielding closed-end funds (CEFs) to our portfolio, while taking profits on our holdings from time to time.

With that in mind, and with the halfway point of the year only just behind us, I wanted to bring up one fund that’s performed very well for us indeed, and continues to look strong as we roll into the back half of 2026 (and beyond).… Read more

One of our favorite tech-focused closed-end funds (CEFs) is showing a pattern we love to see. What I’m going to show you below is one of my favorite setups for future gains for us, while we collect strong dividends, too.

The fund in question—the BlackRock Technology and Private Equity Term Trust (BTX)—yields 7.4% as I write this, so we’re getting paid handsomely while we wait for those gains to materialize.

Plus, the performance of this CEF’s underlying portfolio, or its “total NAV return” in CEF-speak, has earned enough over the past 12 months—43.8%, to be exact—to pay that dividend many times over, so the payout looks safe (and is paid monthly, to boot).… Read more

You’ve no doubt heard the old Wall Street saw: “Sell in May and go away.”

There’s one problem with it: It doesn’t tell us when to buy again. 

I mean, many investors take it to mean that the best time to buy again is in the fall, after Halloween. So maybe we could say, “In the season of orange and black, it’s finally time to go back”?

I don’t know. I’m not a poet (as you can probably tell).

But I am an investment strategist, and in my 15 years working in the field, I’ve seen this “sell in May” advice work sometimes and be disastrous at others.… Read more

As America celebrates its 250th, there’s something happening inside its economy that’s not getting enough attention.

A quiet boom.

It’s one more thing worth celebrating this month—and we’re going to do that. We’re also going to get set for the next leg of America’s low-key growth run with a closed-end fund (CEF) yielding north 11.6%.

The chart below, which The Economist published two years ago, nicely sums up the wealth-building power of the US economy over the long haul.

The key piece of info here is on the left side of this chart. Here, we can see that over the last century, each generation of Americans has started its working career earning more than previous ones.… Read more