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A big thank you to the 1,640 subscribers who attended our Contrarian Income Report webcast! As discussed on the call, I did my best to address pre-submitted questions during the session.

Even more questions came in during the live webcast. (I love the enthusiasm!) As you know, while I’m not allowed to give personal investment advice, I do read every question. And I like to use this weekly column to address the most common questions. So, let’s chat about your shared thoughts, curiosities and concerns.

Q: Should I be worried about the latest coronavirus? If not me, how about my portfolio?… Read more

Let’s be honest: our lives would be much easier if we could just buy the typical S&P 500 stock, get the 7%+ dividends we need for retirement, and call it a day. Trouble is, the popular kids only pay high yields when the market’s in flames!

Like Pfizer (PFE), which yields a ho-hum 3.8% now. But if you’d bought when stocks bottomed during the financial crisis, you’d be sitting on a cash machine: back then (March 2009), Pfizer’s payout shot up to an incredible 11%!

Pfizer’s (Very) Temporary 11% Yield

Of course, you needed quick reflexes and nerves of steel to lock in that yield before it vanished in the rebound.… Read more

One of the weirdest trends over the last year has gone largely unreported. Despite stocks surging 30% in a year, investors are still selling stocks more than they’re buying.

It’s hard to get your head around this fact, but the data says it’s true. According to data from Refinitiv Lipper, investors actually withdrew $192.3 billion from mutual funds and ETFs—the largest amount of outflows on record for a single year.

Stocks Soar—and Investors Sell?

The concept here is a little complicated, but it’s crucial to understand. An ETF or mutual fund pools together cash from its investors, which it then uses to buy stocks, bonds or whatever its mandate says it needs to buy.… Read more

Dividends are the surest, safest building block of a comfortable retirement. And you needn’t just “settle” for retiring on dividends. You can even pick dividend stocks that’ll double your money or better, too.

All you need is a little quality.

What’s is “Quality”?

Quality isn’t some nebulous idea. It’s a “factor,” and it’s defined by a set of attributes or characteristics that the Wall Street “quants” are increasingly affectionate for.

Factor-based investing has become quite the rage in recent years. It’s a way to slice and dice the stock market by numbers. Yield, value, momentum, and other metrics are the ingredients.… Read more

The latest trade-war hype has served up a terrific opportunity for us to bag 6%+ dividends (and upside) in closed-end funds (CEFs).

Today I’m going to show you exactly where to look (hint: it’s the last place you’d expect) and reveal a CEF with serious upside in 2020. It’s set to ride this unheralded opportunity while dropping its generous 6.5%+ dividends on us.

First off, I hope your nest egg didn’t fall into this “tariff trap”:

First Shot in Trade War Takes Out Investors

That’s what the market did when President Trump announced his first tariffs on China two years ago, on solar panels and washing machines.… Read more

Will this bull market actually die of old age this year?

The macro picture is dicey and stock valuations are pricey, but we must stay invested. The stock market goes up about two-thirds of the time. Permabears miss out on compounding and it’s not as easy to be a part-time bear as it sounds.

To illustrate this let’s consider a study by Hulbert Financial. The firm looked at the best “peak market timers”–the gurus who correctly forecasted the bursting of the Internet bubble in March 2000 and the Great Recession in October 2007.

These were the clairvoyant advisors who had their clients out of stocks and mostly in cash when the S&P 500 was about to be chopped in half.… Read more

We’re just three weeks into 2020 and it’s already a dividend wasteland!

Happy New Year! Enjoy Your 1.7% Dividend

Drop $500K into the typical (miserly) S&P 500 stock today and you get a pathetic $713 a month in dividend payouts. That’s no retirement; it might cover the cost of your commute and coffee on the way to your job as a Walmart (WMT) greeter—so long as you avoid going to Starbucks (SBUX)!

Treasuries? Forget it. At a 1.8% yield, we’re not retiring on them, either.

No wonder I hear from so many investors wary of putting their cash in a market yielding less than inflation.… Read more

It’s the No. 1 retirement question: how much income do you need to quit the 9 to 5?

Today I’m going to help you find your number.

The best place to start is by asking yourself how your post-retirement lifestyle goal stacks up that of the average working American. Do you want to live lavishly or closer to the middle class?

Once you’ve answered that question, the next step is to look to this number: $33,706.

Average American Incomes

According to the Federal Reserve, that’s the average income an American worker earns, and it gives us a handy jumping-off point. This figure has been rising lately, but has stayed stable over the long haul.… Read more

Income hunters that made their way into real estate investment trusts (REITs) at the start of 2019 are rolling in more than rent checks right now. Not only did they enjoy the sector’s generous dividends, they enjoyed big price gains to boot.

Even the “dumbly indexed” Vanguard Real Estate ETF (VNQ) peeled off a sweet 28.9% in total returns last year. That’s its best showing since 2014, and more than double its average annual return of 11%-plus over the past decade.

But do these big 2019 gains mean that we’re due to regress in 2020?

I’ve previously warned about the dangers of holding REITs whose fundamentals are out of whack with its valuation.… Read more

Today I’m going to show you how one lucky group of investors nailed a once-in-a-lifetime shot at a huge, tax-free dividend stream and a quick 18% gain, too!

Well, not exactly “once-in-a-lifetime.” Because this opportunity is still waiting for you today—you just need to know how to tap it.

In a moment, I’ll give you the goods (including a name and ticker) on a closed-end fund (CEF) to target now. It hands you a 4.2% dividend you likely won’t have to pay a penny of federal tax on (and your payout could be exempt from state taxes, as well). 

To cut to the chase, thanks to its lucrative tax breaks, this fund’s 4.2% payout could be worth 7% or more to you today, depending on your tax bracket.… Read more