Author Archive: Michael Foster

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

I’ve dedicated my career to closed-end funds (CEFs) because in a way, these high-yield investments saved my life: Using these funds to get an 8% income stream from my portfolio gave me the confidence I needed to quit my academic job well over a decade ago.

I started writing about CEFs after that, mostly out of surprise and confusion: Why weren’t these reliable income plays—which yield 8.2% on average now—more popular?

Well, after over a decade of talking to economists, bankers, fund managers and other experts, I’ve come to realize they should be more popular, and that they probably would be after a big shock to markets made them irresistible.… Read more

I’ve been covering closed-end funds (CEFs) for more than a decade. Through that time (and still today!) I’ve been shocked at how many people sleepwalk right past these incredible income plays, and the big dividends (and upside) they offer.

CEFs are publicly traded and highly regulated, like mutual funds or ETFs. The key difference? Big dividends! The 500 or so CEFs out there yield 8.4% on average, and they’ve historically have yielded 7%+.

They work by investing in the kinds of assets most of us own already—stocks, bonds and real estate mostly. They then hand out the resulting profits as dividends.… Read more

At my CEF Insider service, we started 2024 expecting stocks to rise about 10% to 15% this year. Well, we’re well within that range now: the S&P 500 is up just under 14% in 2024, as of this writing.

And it’s only June! Which means that while stocks can keep going higher, we’ll likely see more dips as the market catches its breath.

We’ll use those dips to pick up our favorite 8%+ yielding closed-end funds (CEFs), of course. But we don’t have to wait around for our next dip-buying opportunity—I’ve got three bargain-priced bond funds for you to consider now, yielding up to 12.5%.… Read more

You probably remember the first time you heard about ChatGPT. The AI tool’s lifelike responses seemed like magic—so much so that people were debating whether generative AI tools like it were actually conscious.

Such a debate was honestly a bit silly, and it didn’t last long. But the idea that these large-language models were sentient proved how much AI can emotionally influence people.

Fast-forward to today and that response is much less starry-eyed. You’ve no doubt run across AI-created content and art on the Internet that is, frankly, terrible (not to mention glaringly obvious). That’s prompted outlets like The Wall Street Journal to tell us “The AI revolution is already losing steam” and compare the industry to the “biggest crashes of the first dot-com bubble.”… Read more

You may have noticed that since the pandemic, there’s been a somewhat perverse desire to make the economy look worse than it is.

Whether it’s concerns about a looming recession—the so-called “vibecession” we talked about last week—or worries that life is getting too expensive because of inflation, there’s a growing bias toward doom-and-gloom.

Plus, pessimistic people tend to sound serious—and for many pundits, parroting these arguments is easier than actually analyzing data.

At CEF Insider, we remain 100% data-driven, for the simple reason that it’s profitable. After all, the doom-and-gloom was at a fever pitch in late 2022, and we all know how stocks have done since.… Read more