Author Archive: Michael Foster

It pains me when I see regular folks take the flawed “advice” to simply plow their money into an index fund and call it a day.

The biggest problem with this “strategy” is there’s basically no income: the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY) yields just 1.2% today, so you’d need a million-dollar portfolio just to generate a pathetic $12,000 a year in dividends!

Poverty-level income on a million bucks! That’s unacceptable. And it’s precisely why I’m going to share a much better option with you—yielding an mammoth 7.8%—in a moment.

I was thinking about the “lazy” ETF strategy recently when I was reading a blog post by fintech startup Acorns, which suggested going with an ETF like the Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF (VTI), which invests in a whopping 3,935 US companies of all sizes, and combining it with the Vanguard Total International Stock Index (VGTSX) for international exposure.… Read more

If anyone tells you that all the big dividends have been bought up in this inflated market, do yourself a favor: tune them out.

Because while stocks are up—and dividend yields are down as a result—there are still high, cheap payouts to be had out there. And we closed-end fund (CEF) investors know exactly where to find them. In a moment, we’ll nail down a couple of funds that are still attractively priced today, and they pay you 6%+ dividends, to boot.

That said, deals certainly aren’t falling out of trees in CEFs these days—we have to dig deeper to uncover them than we ever have before.… Read more

Overbought stock markets—and pathetic 1% dividends—here in the US just might have you tempted to look overseas for higher payouts.

It’s a smart move. After all, plenty of countries offer investors higher dividends than America. For example, the yield on the FTSE 100 index, which consists of the 100 biggest companies on the London Stock Exchange by market cap, is 3.4% today, nearly triple the average S&P 500 payout of 1.3%.

(And you can get strong diversification across the globe—with a strong North American base—when you buy the 8%-yielding fund we’ll get to shortly.)

But as we discussed a couple weeks ago, we need to steer well clear of (or at least be very careful with) any exposure to China, because as fast as the country’s growth has been, the governing Chinese Communist Party’s respect for free markets is questionable—and has been growing more so of late.… Read more

Something weird is happening in the housing market, and it’s handing us an outstanding opportunity in stocks (including the 8%-yielding pick we’ll dive into shortly).

I know that’s an odd statement. After all, how can housing and stocks really be that connected? And how can we be so optimistic about housing when it has already soared in the last 18 months, and bubble warnings are everywhere?

The answer is that, as we contrarians know, the way the headlines make things appear in the markets is often very unlike how they actually are.

Look at the chart below, which shows, on the right, the average monthly mortgage payment over the past 45 years, in five-year increments, on the typical home (using the median average house price for each year, minus a 10% down payment).… Read more

It’s hard to believe, but there actually is a 10% dividend sitting right under investors’ noses—even now, when the typical S&P 500 stock dribbles out a pathetic 1.3% payout.

That 10% payer is a closed-end fund (CEF) called the Liberty All-Star Equity Fund (USA). We’re going to put this fund in the spotlight today, so we can see how it offers such a large dividend in these income-lean times, and whether it may be for you.

Let’s start with performance: USA has delivered a total return far larger than that of the market in the last five- and 10-year spans (as well as in the last three years, one year and for 2021 so far).… Read more

As dividend investors, we don’t usually read the tea leaves in employment reports (that, after all, is the domain of economists!). But there is something happening in the working world that’s set to power the payouts, and prices, of a select group of closed-end funds (CEFs) for years to come.

That is this: people are spending less time in the office. But productivity isn’t falling. And of course, demand for workers is surging right now, setting the stage for pay hikes, bonuses, stock options—just about any way to put more money in workers’ pockets that you can think of.

Employment Roars.… Read more

These days, many of the dividend investors I talk to feel squeezed between:

1. Weak yields (which have plunged as stocks have surged) and
2. High taxes (which are likely to rise further).

You’re no doubt feeling this pinch, too. The good news is that there’s an investment that lets you wiggle out of this trap, regularly offering steady-as-she-goes dividends up to 5%.

There’s another nice twist that works in your favor here, because these payouts are tax-free, so they could be worth a lot more to you—I’m talking payouts north of 7.5% with tax savings factored in, depending on your tax bracket.… Read more

If you’re not holding at least some of your portfolio in international dividend stocks, you’re missing out.

Stocks (and funds) in some overseas markets pay higher dividends than US companies. The 60 biggest stocks on Canada’s Toronto Stock Exchange yield 2.5% right now, for example, compared to a 1.3% average yield for the S&P 500.

What’s more, plenty of US investors are (in many cases unintentionally) biased toward their home country, with more than three-quarters of their portfolios, on average, invested in the US, according to recent numbers from Franklin Templeton.

To a degree, that’s understandable—after all, America has the world’s biggest and most dynamic stock markets, boasting dominant big cap firms such as Pfizer (PFE), Ford Motor Co.… Read more

I’m hearing from a lot of dividend investors suffering from “bull-market blues”: while stocks have soared, driving up their portfolios’ value, they’re stuck on what to do with their gains—because stocks have soared (and yields have plunged)!

It’s a vicious cycle that doesn’t look like it’ll end anytime soon, and it’s even hit what are traditionally the most overlooked corners of the market.

Take my favorite high-yield investments, closed-end funds (CEFs), which regularly offer huge yields of 7% or more. CEFs invest in all sorts of things, from energy to utilities to corporate bonds and US stocks. And by and large, they’ve gotten pricey, too (but there are still some deals to be had in the space, as we’ll discuss shortly).… Read more

We talk a lot about discounts and dividends in our CEF Insider service. And they’re critical, of course. The need for a high dividend is obvious, especially if you’re in or near retirement. And buying a CEF at a big discount to net asset value (NAV) can slingshot us to serious price gains.

But being too focused on one number, be it the discount, the dividend or an individual stock’s P/E ratio, is what renowned contrarian Howard Marks calls “first-level thinking.” To get to the real truth of whether an investment is worth buying, we need to go deeper.

Of course, we contrarians know this.… Read more