Articles

Let’s go ahead and break down a recent “win” at my CEF Insider service: an unloved fund that handed us a 48% total return in 10 months!

Why? Because this call went our way for plenty of reasons—and we can take those reasons and “convert” them to strategies that can give us the kind of portfolio we all want: one that delivers healthy dividend income and strong price upside. 

The fund in question: the Columbia Seligman Premium Technology Growth Fund (STK), which returned that 48% from our buy call in the November 2025 CEF Insider to our sell in the recently released September issue.… Read more

I’m hearing a lot from subscribers who are worried about rising rates. I get it. If you’re watching the financial news, it’s all they are talking about. And if you watch your portfolio (too?) closely, you see that the prices of your bond funds are declining.

Which, like, defeats the point of bonds. We’re here for the yield and not to give back our dividends via capital losses.

Bond prices fall as rates rise because, even if the bonds a fund owns are perfectly fine (paying their coupons on schedule), the value declines. Who wants to buy an old bond paying 3% if newer bonds pay more?… Read more

We contrarians love it when the crowd mislabels a stock and tosses it overboard. We really love it when this happens to the same stock twice!

Today we’re going to look at a perfect example: an 8.3%-paying closed-end fund (CEF) most people treat as a bond proxy. But it’s much more than that.

That’s strike one for the mainstream crowd. And it’s the first part of our setup here.

Next, when investors aren’t slapping that label on this fund, they’re mistakenly referring to it as a utility fund.

Strike two!

When a situation like this crops up, we essentially get a deal on top of a deal.… Read more

Today I want to talk about something we don’t touch on very often in these columns: an obscure (yet highly profitable) situation called a “tender offer.”

I know the name sounds a bit stiff. But if one comes along when you hold a closed-end fund (CEF)—particularly a CEF you bought when it was particularly oversold—wow.

You can find yourself sitting on a fast gain as well as a high dividend payout (as I write this, the average CEF yields around 9%).

As we’ll see in the case of one CEF below, a tender offer can take a fund purchased at an 11.5% discount and let the shareholder cash in a chunk of their holding at nearly full value.… Read more

If you like dividends, check out the discounted cash flows currently available in REIT land. Real estate investment trusts (REITs) have hit the skids in recent months as investors have panicked about the Federal Reserve raising rates. Their worries bring value to us, and today we’re going to highlight five REITs yielding 5.3% to 12.3%.

Now, we income investors are fans of REITs because they pay out most of the profits to us as dividends. Congress created this business structure decades ago, and it included a mandate for dividends—REITs, in exchange for significant federal tax advantages, must dole out at least 90% of their taxable income as distributions back to us.… Read more

This latest shift toward interest rate hikes has sent income investors into a tizzy. That’s great for us, because they’re tossing out one terrific fund kicking out a 7.8% dividend that’s grown.

This smartly run corporate-bond fund is now on the table for 11.9% below the value of its portfolio. That not only positions this fund (a closed-end fund, or CEF, to be exact) for future upside—it helps cushion its portfolio, letting us collect its 7.8% payout in peace as the Fed raises rates.

I know that may sound strange: Usually higher rates are bad for bonds, especially for funds chock full of bonds that pay out “old” rates that may be lower than the “new” interest rates likely to come.… Read more

“If winning isn’t supposed to matter, then why are they introducing a playoff system?”

I shook my head in disbelief as I whispered this unfolding “riddle” to my coaching buddy in the chair next to me. We were at the YMCA fall basketball meeting, sweating it out in the preschool room. (Where was the air conditioning on this sultry September evening?)

The YMCA regional manager, notorious for talking for an hour about the exact same thing to kick off every season, had something new. And to be honest, the “ruling” made no sense to me.

Playoffs? We’re talkin’ about…playoffs?… Read more

In one corner of the income market, a “rubber band” is stretched about as far as it can go.

When it snaps back, I expect it to catapult the prices of a select group of 10%+ payers much higher from here.

Those 10%+ payers are bond-focused closed-end funds (CEFs). This latest bond panic has blown out their discounts to levels not seen in four years. That’s dropped their prices. And because yields and prices move in opposite directions, a buy today gets us “starter yields” up to 13% here.

That’s our window—it’s exactly where our corporate-bond CEFs are now.

Here’s the thing, though.… Read more

One thing we love to find as income investors? A situation where a double-digit dividend is coming our way—at an undeserved double-digit discount.

Every now and then, a situation like that can get truly extreme. These are the times when we really want to take a closer look.

This is the kind of setup we have with a closed-end fund (CEF) called FS Credit Opportunities Corp. (FSCO) right now.

I’ll cut right to the vitals. As I write this, FSCO yields 13.7%.

The discount? It sits at 27%.

In other words, this fund is now on the table for just 73 cents on the dollar.… Read more

Don’t look now, but crude oil is back over $100 a barrel. Prices are on fire, rising 20% since July, and the Strait of Hormuz is still shut. Diesel fuel, the transportation fossil fuel of record, sits at a record $6.23 per gallon.

WTI: Up, Up and Away

Now, betting on geopolitical outcomes is a dicey game, so placing a bet on the crisis extending or world peace breaking out is tricky. The sure bet is looking at five closed-end funds (CEFs) paying 8.5% on average. Four of these five funds have had an impressive run, and they now trade at narrower discounts than their five-year norms, so we’re watching.… Read more