Articles

Money market accounts still offer 5%, but these rates won’t last. Short-term yields are dropping, fast.

With the “safe 5% party” ending, you and I should skedaddle to the “11% yield afterparty” now. Fear not, my fellow contrarian—I have an extra dividend VIP pass for you.

Fed Chair Jay Powell’s tenure is in the homestretch. Whether or not ol’ Jay makes it to the finish or gets hauled off prematurely, the Chair is a lame duck as far as the markets are concerned.

Traders are pricing in two Fed cuts over the next nine months. Meanwhile, the industry projects money market rates to plummet to 3.8% by year end, with the 2-year Treasury yield also trending down, currently at 3.9%.… Read more

There aren’t many things we can say for certain these days, but there is one: We dividend investors are far better off than the mainstream crowd!

Consider the poor souls holding “America’s ticker”—my name for the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY). I call it that because, well, pretty well everyone owns it. These folks white-knuckled it through the April “tariff tantrum” and are now on a knife edge as the ETF bobs around near all-time highs, boosting the odds of yet another sharp drop.

Of course, pullbacks are a constant in investing (and something we contrarians love to tap for bargains!).… Read more

I know I don’t have to tell you this market is “pricey”—levitating from all-time high to all-time high. That’s got a lot of investors stuck on the sidelines, too afraid to buy until we get another dip.

That’s too bad for them, because sitting on your hands right now is a mistake.

Here’s the truth: Even at times like these, we should be buying—especially through discounted closed-end funds (CEFs), which are, in my view, the best income plays out there, with many paying 8% and more.

From Fear to Greed 

It’s hard to believe now, but back in April, the level of fear hit levels higher than we saw even during the COVID lockdowns or the 2022 rate-driven crash.… Read more

Quarterly payers are the norm. But monthly dividends…. Yeah, that’s that stuff.

Today we’ll chat about five monthly divvies that yield between 5.8% and 16.3% per year. That’s right, these stocks pay early, often and heavy.

What’s wrong with a plain ‘ol quarterly dividend? Let’s consider using my Income Calendar dividend projection tool. If we put $100K into each of the top five stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, here is the lumpy, inconsistent and sad income picture we are looking at:

Dividends From Top 5 Dow Stocks

Source: Income Calendar

Lumpy and, let’s be honest—lame.

Instead let’s consider our five monthly payers.… Read more

Think back three months: The market was in the throes of the “tariff terror.” Us? We were doing what we always do: sifting out overly beaten down closed-end funds (CEFs) with huge yields.

Today, the stock market is doing the opposite of what it was back then—levitating from all-time high to all-time high. And we’re still finding bargain-priced dividends. Right now, some of the best ones are in corporate-bond CEFs.

Let’s keep at it now by zeroing on two corporate-bond CEFs that are still undervalued—though one much more than the other. On average, they yield north of 9%.

I mention the April tariff crash for a reason: In an April 17 article (published as trade confusion reigned), I focused on two oversold PIMCO corporate-bond funds that, at the time, yielded 10.1% between them.… Read more

“Let me get this straight. You haven’t been doing these live chats… live?”

This was the final question yours truly would ever pose to a human support person. Nine months ago, I realized our main customer service “live chat” agent for my software company wasn’t doing his job in real time.

He would log on twice a day and bang out second-rate replies to the messages that had accrued via our website. Rinse and repeat. He had a good gig going until I dropped in.

My original plans were to replace him with another support person. Instead, I spent a few hours the following weekend “training” an AI model to handle customer service replies.… Read more

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (BBB) is now law—and there’s one contrarian move we can make now to profit from it.

I’m not talking about shorting 10-year Treasuries (though that might work, given the inflationary policies “baked in” here!).

Instead we’re going long—on American oil and gas. But we’re not looking at producers. We’re going with pipeline operators like Kinder Morgan (KMI), a holding in our Hidden Yields dividend-growth service, to ride the $3 trillion in stimulus the BBB is about to set loose.

Why? Two reasons:

1. Strong dividends: KMI pays a 4.2% dividend that grows every year, and …
2. We get a hedge on oil and gas prices: Most of KMI’s contracts are either “take-or-pay,” under which users are on the hook for the full fee no matter how much product they pump, or “fee-based,” with rates that are fixed no matter what oil and gas prices do.

With stocks levitating higher, you just might be starting to peek at other investment ideas (bonds? REITs?) to spread out your risk and, most importantly, boost your dividends.

It’s always a smart strategy, and especially so now. We ran through an easy way to diversify while grabbing yourself a healthy 7.9% payout in last Thursday’s article (click here to catch up if you missed it).

“Munis” Cut Your Taxes, Boost Your Payouts—But Timing Matters

Which brings me to my favorite income plays, closed-end funds (CEFs), and in particular those that hold municipal bonds. (“Munis” are issued by state and local governments to fund infrastructure projects.… Read more

The last bargains on the big board? Discounted closed-end funds (CEFs).

CEFs are often the “last stop” for dividend deals. We are talking about an inefficient corner of the income universe, which is just great for us contrarians—we love the discounts.

And these funds can trade for less than “fair value” for months and even years on end. When the markets washed out in April, these CEFs were discarded by their vanilla dividend owners. Let’s pick up the pieces for up to 12% off, or 88 cents on the dollar. And in the process secure yields up to 9.7%.

Nuveen Dow 30 Dynamic Overwrite Fund (DIAX)
Distribution Rate: 8.4%

We’ll start with the Nuveen Dow 30 Dynamic Overwrite Fund (DIAX), an example of a strategy that thrives in CEF land: covered calls.… Read more

Tariffs. Inflation. Soaring interest rates. The financial press, of course, blares about all of them—day in and day out.

Truth is, they have to do this to get your attention. But it’s also unhealthy to your portfolio, as investing based on the headlines leads to traps like trading too much, selling at the bottom and buying at the top.

(This, as members know, is why we focus on high-yield closed-end funds and aim to hold long term. This lets us tune out the headlines and “automatically” reinvest our 8%+ average payouts in corners of our portfolio that are on sale at any given time.… Read more