Author Archive: Michael Foster

If you invest outside the US, you’re probably pretty happy with 2017 so far.

Heck, even if you’ve stayed inside America’s borders, you’re looking a nice 10% return through the first 7 months, going by the performance of the S&P 500.

(And speaking of the US, my colleague Brett Owens recently revealed 4 great all-American stocks yielding up to 10%. You can get their names by clicking here.)

But those who play in the global sandbox have seen some truly spectacular returns, especially folks who hold closed-end funds that invest in foreign stocks. In fact, the CEF Insider Foreign Sub-Index is up a whopping 20.1% since the start of the year—and it isn’t slowing down.… Read more

If you’ve been on the sidelines as this market grinds higher, you’re probably suffering a severe case of FOMO (fear of missing out).

It’s a terrible feeling, but today I’m going to cure you of it entirely, because it’s not too late to jump in!

The key is to zero in on a group of investments known as closed-end funds.

I’ll tell you about them—and introduce you to 5 attractive CEFs—in a moment. But for now, here’s the upshot: these overlooked, easy-to-buy funds are beating the market, but some are still priced at big discounts to their “true” value.

That means you’re not only going to get a strong return here, but you’ll also get a lot of income, too.… Read more

When a clock is broken, it’s right twice a day. But when a permabear warns a stock market crash is coming “any day now,” how many times can they be right?

Well, if you’ve been waiting for a crash since the last one, you’ve been waiting for almost a decade. And that just empowers the bears to say it’s inevitable—it’s been so long since the last crash, surely another one is coming soon, right?

Wrong.

Here are three reasons why the stock market is set to keep going up.

1) Earnings Growth Is Strong

In the first quarter, analysts predicted 9% earnings growth for S&P 500 companies, and that helped the benchmark SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY) and Vanguard 500 Index Fund (VOO) rise over 8% in the first half of 2017.… Read more

Today I’m going to show you how to get a livable income stream from a $300,000 nest egg—while growing your savings at the same time.

Sounds impossible, right?

Wrong.

What’s more, we’re going to pull it off using just six funds. When we’re done, we’ll end up with a simple, diversified portfolio that throws off a nice, steady 7.9% dividend yield!

And if you’re worried that this outsized yield could come at the cost of a weak total return, don’t be, because these funds have delivered 12% per year over the past decade.

Before I get into these six funds, let me show you what numbers like these can mean for you: if we start with an upfront investment of $305,000 in this portfolio and leave it alone for 10 years, we can expect our capital to explode to nearly $1 million in a decade.… Read more

Something tragic happened at the start of this month—but it’s such a familiar tragedy that no one should have been surprised.

If you held the PIMCO CA Municipal Income III Fund (PZC), however, I bet you were surprised—and now you might be panicking. A closed-end fund (CEF) that was soaring for months all of a sudden crashed, going from being up 12% year-to-date to down 2.8%:

Look Out Below

Until July 3, PZC was one of the best-performing municipal-bond funds in the world. While the CEF Insider Tax-Free Bond Index was up 6.1%, PZC had nearly doubled it, gaining a stunning 11.6%.… Read more

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: “There’s a recession every seven years.”

It’s the kind of financial folk wisdom that sounds right but is, in fact, all wrong. But that doesn’t stop influential people from touting it as truth.

Morgan Stanley, for example, was warning investors that the seven-year cycle was a serious risk back in 2015. And they were wrong.

The world’s GDP rose 3.2% in 2015 and 3.1% in 2016, according to the International Monetary Fund. The US didn’t do too badly, either, growing 2.6% and 1.6% in those years. So far, 2% looks like an easy target for 2017.… Read more

Something strange happened recently, and it’s set up a terrific—and almost totally overlooked—profit opportunity for you.

What is it?

The European Union is going to ensure that people who held bonds in two recently failed banks (Veneto Banca and Popolare di Vicenza) will get a 100% bailout.

Now unless you’re holding these specific bonds, you’re probably wondering what this could possibly have to do with you.

Stick with me—I’ll get to that in a second. First, back to the bailout.

The EU’s move isn’t actually all that surprising. We’ve seen governments bail out bondholders many times since 2007 (and the EU has been doing even more bond bailouts in the last couple years).… Read more

At the start of June, I warned investors to avoid a certain fund like the plague.

It’s down almost 10% since then.

Of course, anyone long the fund was turning a blind eye to the very real dangers lurking behind it. Today I want to talk about the mistake they made and how we can avoid repeating this blunder in the future.

First, let me tell you what fund I’m talking about. It’s run by one of the greatest investment companies in the world, with one of the best track records out there; in fact, it’s one of the few companies that has consistently beaten the market for over a decade across most of its investments.… Read more

Everyone’s obsessing over FAAMG stocks, and for good reason. Facebook (FB), Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN), Microsoft (MSFT) and Google, now known as Alphabet (GOOG), are on a tear for 2017, rising nearly 30%, on average.

And today I’m going to show you two funds that invest in these companies while offering higher dividends than any of these stocks pay individually.

Of course, everyone has heard of Facebook, Apple and Google. (And in case you missed it, my colleague Brett Owens revealed five individual tech stocks he likes now on June 19.)

But hardly anyone has heard of either of these high-yielding tech funds.… Read more

Today I’m going to show you why some funds are killing the S&P 500—and how you can dramatically boost your odds of doing exactly the same thing.

One way not to do it is by investing in a dying asset class: traditional mutual funds. Since most mutual funds have underperformed the market, the number of funds out there has flat-lined, while the number of exchange-traded funds (ETFs), mutual funds’ low-cost cousins, keeps exploding. There are now about 2,000 ETFs on US exchanges, and they account for about a third of all US trading.

But as I wrote on February 21 (and have said many times since), I don’t recommend you join the ever-growing crowd of ETF fans, either.… Read more