Author Archive: Michael Foster

Most folks think retiring on $527K is a dream—but most folks haven’t heard of high-yield closed end funds (CEFs). With yields as high as 22%, these unsung income plays can fast-track your race to financial independence.

Here’s how: let’s say you’re looking to clock out and use your portfolio to replace $50,000 in yearly employment income. Many financial advisors will tell you that the most you can withdraw out of a conservative stock portfolio is 4% a year (this is known as the 4% safe withdrawal rate). Simple math tells us that this means you will need $1,250,000 to retire.… Read more

Today we’re going to cut through the economic hype surrounding this crisis and jump on a little-noticed opportunity for double-digit upside and 7% dividends, too.

I’ll get into the raw numbers, and some specific tickers, shortly.

First, here’s a figure you may have read in the news: US households lost $6 trillion in the first quarter of 2020. That’s tough to get your head around: it equates to $57,551 per household.

Taken on its own, you might think it means we’re in for a long, dreary recovery. But there are a few facts we need to complete the picture.

The first: Americans didn’t go that deeply in debt to offset that loss.… Read more

One of the worst disasters to befall investors in this crisis was something called the MORL dividend.

MORL is—or rather was—the ticker for the ETRACS Monthly Pay 2XLeveraged ETN (MORL). What’s MORL? It’s a double-leveraged bank-issued note designed to track the MVIS Global Mortgage REITs Index, a market-cap-weighted global mortgage-REIT index.

A mouthful, right?

But the jargon and obscure nature of this investment didn’t stop a lot of people from buying in. The reason was simple: MORL yielded as much as 25% back in March.

Think about that for a minute: a 25% dividend. Hold MORL for just four years and you’d get your entire investment back in cash payouts without selling a single share.… Read more

A handful of closed-end funds (CEFs) are boasting what are (at first) tantalizing dividend payouts. I’m talking 15%, 20% and even 40% annualized yields here.

Skeptical? You should be.

Today we’re going to delve into the two highest-paying funds in the CEF world and look at what’s driving their sky-high payouts. Each tells us a lot about what to avoid when buying CEFs for our portfolios.

High-Yield CEF #1: 22% Payout Masks a Dreadful Dividend History

The Cornerstone Strategic Value Fund (CLM) regularly yields more than 15%, even when average CEF yields are historically low. Now that all CEF yields are higher, due to an overall pullback in these funds’ market prices, CLM’s payout is a monster 22%.… Read more

You can be forgiven for not looking to the big-name tech stocks for high dividends. Just look at this rogue’s gallery of pathetic payouts!

• Facebook (FB): Dividend yield: 0%
• Amazon.com (AMZN): Dividend yield: 0%
• Apple (AAPL): Dividend yield: 0.9%
• Netflix (NFLX): Dividend yield: 0%
• Google, a.k.a. Alphabet (GOOGL): Dividend yield: 0%

Those are the so-called FAANG stocks—the darlings of the tech world. But they’re no place for retirees, or anyone else on the hunt for dividends. (Though there is one often-ignored way to get an 8.5% dividend from them; more on that in a second.)

Luckily for the folks who hold these stocks, which make up about 17% of the S&P 500, they’ve made up for their pathetic—or nonexistent—dividends in outsized price gains as the market has bounced back.… Read more

What if I told you I’d found a way for you to buy Microsoft (MSFT), Apple (AAPL), Home Depot (HD), McDonald’s (MCD) and other big-name stocks for 14% off their current prices?

It would be like rewinding the clock on this rebound, wouldn’t it? With stocks now having mostly erased their year-to-date losses, buying at a 14% discount would, in essence, be like buying these very same stocks back in late April:

Your Stock-Market “Time Machine”

The way to do this is by purchasing a closed-end fund (CEF) that holds these stocks. Not only do CEFs regularly trade at big discounts to their “true” value, but they also pay dividends far higher than individual stocks do—I’m talking rich payouts of 7% and up.… Read more

These days, I’m hearing from a lot of investors interested in monthly dividend stocks.

It’s easy to see why: monthly dividends line up nicely with our bills, something that’s very helpful in a crisis like this one. And if you’re reinvesting your payouts, monthly payers give your returns an extra lift in the long run because you can put your dividend cash to work faster.

There’s only one problem with these stocks: they’re few and far between.

Monthly Payers a Fraction of the Market

Source: CEF Insider

As you can see above, if we limit ourselves to monthly payers, we’re literally shutting out almost all of the market.… Read more

If you invest in closed-end funds (CEFs) or are thinking about it (and you should be!), I’ve got great news: there’s one simple indicator that tells you exactly when to buy (or sell) these high-yield income plays.

(If you’re a member of my CEF Insider service, you probably know what I’m going to say next.)

I’m talking about the discount to net asset value (NAV), which you can find on pretty well any fund screener. Today we’re going to see how one group of investors rode this simple metric to an amazing 662% in gains and dividends.

Your 1-Click CEF “Buy Alarm”

The discount to NAV is unique to CEFs.… Read more

Today we’re going to dive into the three best closed end funds of all time. These retirement-changing dividend plays—yielding all the way up to 8.6%!—have not only been crushing all other CEFs, but they’ve been demolishing the S&P 500, as well.

That’s just not supposed to happen!

After all, the pundits are constantly telling us that actively managed funds should not beat the S&P 500, and you’d be better off with a low-cost index fund like the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (VOO).

But these three CEFs have been crushing VOO for years—and they’re on track to keep doing so.

That’s not all they offer—these funds also pay dividends more than three times higher than the S&P 500 average, boosting your nest egg while giving you a much bigger cash stream than you could ever get from index funds.… Read more

If you’re like most people, you’re wondering how in the world the market can be doing this when the country has been on lockdown for the better part of two months:

Stocks Soaring

As you can see above, stocks spiked 22% since late March, going by the performance of the Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF (VTI). Meantime, the economy is a shadow of its former self: the Federal Reserve expects it to shrink 40% in the second quarter—worse than the 23% drop seen at the depths of the Great Depression.

Before you ask, no, this disconnect isn’t a recipe for another crash.… Read more