Author Archive: Michael Foster

Let’s shrug off today’s “dividend desert” and do something most folks think is impossible—ridiculous, even. We’re going to replace our monthly salary with a huge income stream from a group of closed-end funds (CEFs) that yield 7% or more (sometimes a lot more!).

The math here is simple: at a 7% dividend, you’ll have just shy of $3,000 ($2,917, to be precise) flowing into your account every month on a $500K investment. And yes, these dividends do flow your way monthly, right in line with your bills.

These CEFs have been paying these dividends for years, in some cases decades. And there are plenty of them, too: my CEF Insider service tracks 117 CEFs yielding over 7% and paying out every month.… Read more

These days I hear from a lot of CEF investors who are struggling to dig up cheap dividends. If you’re one of these folks, I get it. In fact, I’m right there with you!

Even for those of us who spend our entire day looking for CEF bargains, this market’s been a grind, making it tougher than ever to find high, reasonably priced dividends to recommend to you in CEF Insider.

(But we’re not out of luck here. Today we’re going to look at three 10%+ yielders that would make good speculative plays now, beyond the 13 attractively priced buy recommendations in our CEF Insider portfolio, which I continue to recommend for the lion’s share of your CEF investments.)… Read more

Markets took a dive (then posted a lightning-fast recovery) last week, a return to volatility that’s a good reminder to cast an eye over our dividend portfolios.

One thing to pay particular attention to is the amount of cash you’re holding. Because if you’re like many investors I’ve talked to recently, you’re holding too much of it—and that can cause a steady wealth drain that bleeds away thousands in returns every year!

Taking Money Off the Table—at Exactly the Wrong Time

Of course, having a healthy cash cushion is always a good thing. The trouble for most folks, though, is that they’ve been growing the amount of cash they have outside the market just as stocks have taken off.… Read more

Hands up if you’ve heard of the Strategy Shares Nasdaq 7Handl Index ETF (HNDL). 

Right. I thought not. And I can’t blame you for overlooking this one. It’s a relatively obscure ETF, with a bit over $700 million invested across a number of assets (just what those assets are I’ll get to in a minute).

Nonetheless, HNDL is worth discussing today because it highlights a couple things we need to look out for when picking high-yield funds for our portfolios.

First up, the yield and the strategy: HNDL pays a 6.9% dividend today and promises diversification, both of which sound great.… Read more

One of the so-called “rules” of income investing is that you can get a high dividend or a sustainable dividend from a stock or fund—but not both.

And to be fair, that is true of some investments. But there are plenty of exceptions, too, chief among them an asset class that sports a little-known “trick” that gives us blockbuster 9% dividends that are more than sustainable over the long run.

The CEF Secret

That asset class would be closed-end funds (CEFs), and the “trick” ties into the fund’s discount to net asset value (NAV, or the value of the investments in the fund’s portfolio).… Read more

As I write this, the 14 funds in our CEF Insider portfolio yield a tidy 6.7%, on average. And while that’s down from the 7.5% average (and above) we’ve seen in the past, there’s a good reason: big price gains! (Because prices and yields move in opposite directions, of course.)

And recently, we’ve locked in some of those big returns with timely sales. In our June 2021 CEF Insider issue, for example, we sold the PGIM High Yield Bond Fund (ISD), which we bought in late 2019 (a lifetime ago!) when it was trading at a 10.3% discount to net asset value (NAV).… Read more

Let’s break out of today’s zero-rate wasteland and help ourselves to huge, safe payouts yielding all the way up to 8.3%. And these massive payouts are tax-free too!

And, no, we won’t be hiring a team of CPAs to pull this off—nothing so expensive and impractical. Instead, we’re going to set ourselves up with a closed-end fund (CEF) that holds municipal bonds, or “munis.” And thanks to their tax-free nature, if you’re in the top tax bracket, a muni bond paying, say, a 4% dividend could be worth 7% or more to you.

I’ll give you a specific CEF that’s worth putting on your list now in a second (its 5% stated yield could be worth an outsized 8.3% to you, if you’re in the top tax bracket).… Read more

Imagine two closed-end funds (CEFs) that both yield upwards of 7%. Sounds great, right? Buy a bit of both and get $58.33 per month for every $10,000 you invest. Put in $500K and you’ve got a middle-class income dropping into your account without you having to do a thing.

While that’s a great way to achieve financial independence, we CEF investors know it’s not as easy as searching out a couple of 7% yielders and buying them. We need to go deeper.

While there are over a hundred CEFs yielding 7% or more right now, their quality varies widely. Some are yield traps that will drain your capital with lousy price performance over time, more than offsetting any dividend cash they pay you.… Read more

Imagine getting $100 per month in passive income for every $10,000 you invest. That amounts to a $35,000 annual dividend stream with less than $300,000 saved.

It’s not impossible. In fact, investors do it all the time with my favorite high-yield investments—closed-end funds (CEFs). While the average yield on CEFs is currently 6.2%, a third of these funds yield upwards of 7%, and 17 boast payouts of 10% and higher.

Source: CEF Insider

CEFs’ payouts are particularly impressive considering the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY), an index fund tracking the S&P 500, yields a paltry 1.3% today—the lowest yield for the stock market in 20 years.… Read more

Once folks get a taste of closed-end funds (CEFs), they typically rave about one thing: the dividends! Yields of 7% and up are common with CEFs, and they often come your way monthly.

We also love the fact that even though CEFs are a small corner of the market (with only about 500 or so out there), we can build a diversified portfolio with them: there are CEFs that hold US and international stocks, bonds, real estate—even private equity. You name it.

This broad range gets us around a problem most income-seekers face: being forced to stake significant sums in single stocks just to get big payouts.… Read more