Articles

The world needs to produce more food to feed everyone in the years ahead. Period.

Food shortages are likely to be an unfortunate megatrend of the 2020s. Rising  food demand is intersecting with another megatrend: shaky global supply chains.

Consider this bleak outlook from the U.N. World Food Programme’s 2022 outlook (emphasis mine):

Thinking like a contrarian can sometimes be a crucial part of investing profitably. To be clear, that doesn’t mean you ignore reality. It just means that you’re willing to look beyond the obvious narratives based on the last few trading days, and instead look to what the future holds.

Right now, we’re at an interesting point in the stock market that lends itself to contrarian thinking. On one hand, the last several months have all given us ample proof of the risks on Wall Street – inflation, rising rates and volatility. But looking forward, the narrative may be changing.

July Inflation was flat month-over-month as measured by the Consumer Price Index.… Read more

This market crash has served up some terrific opportunities in closed-end funds (CEFs), many of which are throwing off safe 7%+ dividends today.

Dividends of that size, of course, are critical today, as we look to offset rising inflation. And I think we can all agree that a CD or Treasury will never match a payout like that.

But of course, not all CEFs are set to rise equally as the stock market continues to regain its footing (which I expect it to as we move through the back half of 2022), so we need to be careful about exactly which sectors—and funds—we target.… Read more

I’m proud to report that, for the first time in months, I “only” paid $100 for gas.

There was a catch. The pump had a $100 credit card limit!

Which begs the follow up question: Does your dividend strategist intentionally pump gas in the sketchiest neighborhoods he can find?

As a big guy in a Bills hat, who tends to traverse before the streetlights come on, perhaps I’m game for an adventure.

Fortunately for my wallet, my “soccer dad mobile” traverses a narrow grid. To the kids’ school. The gym. The park. Grocery store. One mile at a time.

A tank can last for weeks, which is helpful.… Read more

Fed Chair Jay Powell is probably going to hike us straight into a recession—and even then, Jay still may not get the 2% inflation he’s hunting for.

Why? Because the supply-chain chaos we’re dealing with now is not going away. It’s part of a megatrend I expect to last the rest of this decade, and well beyond.

I’ll name two stocks we can tap to reap strong gains and fast-growing dividends from what many are calling the “end of globalization” in a moment. First, let’s dive into this critical shift, because it will drive, well, pretty well everything in our lives for years to come.… Read more

If you’re like me, you regularly hear from friends who brag about how they’ve successfully timed the market in the past. What these folks will never tell you is the number of times they’ve missed the boat!

Take last week, when millions of folks were parked on the sidelines, terrified (thanks to scaremongering media reports) that the July CPI print would come in worse than expected, triggering a selloff.

Of course, we now know that the exact opposite happened—and I’m guessing you won’t hear from your friends who failed to grab that bounce!

Look, when other folks do manage to pull off this trick, I salute them.… Read more

Dividend-paying energy stocks are probably going to be the best place to collect income for the rest of the decade.

This is great news because the rest of the stock market is expensive and overheated again. Never thought we’d see it with the Fed tightening, but here we are.

Fortunately we have a dip to buy in energy dividends. These stocks have taken a breather after running up at a blistering pace since April 2020.

(Back when oil prices dropped below zero—to negative $37 per barrel. As contrarian dividend investors, we’ve seen it all together, haven’t we?… Read more

Like many who are passionate about investing, I am a numbers guy. And like many people who are serious about facts and figures, it’s hard to bite my tongue when I run across egregious errors in financial media that might mislead the investing public.

Here are a few that have irked me lately that you should watch out for:

Stock splits:  Arguing that Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL) is different after its July stock split is like arguing that cutting a pizza into more slices somehow changes the quality of the crust. The value of a company or its total profits doesn’t change just because there are more shares (or slices) to go around.… Read more

American novelist William Faulkner once said, “In writing, you must kill your darlings”. It was a warning to other writers not to get too attached to their manuscripts, or their characters, because you always need to be willing to edit and cut down your work to make it truly brilliant.

That advice applies to investing, too. I’ve seen too many investors get emotionally attached to their stocks and funds, which causes them to hold on to losers for too long—or fail to accept that the world has changed. But if we want to minimize our losses (and of course, we always do!),… Read more

It’s a bull market in military budgets, to put it lightly. So, let’s talk about my favorite defense stock dividend for the rest of 2022 and, really, the 2020s.

The US defense budget for 2022 is a record $777 billion. Over 3% of GDP.

We are, however, only one of nine NATO countries to spend 2% or more of our GDP on military spending. This has been a stated goal of NATO since 2006, a standard currently met by less than one-third of members.

With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine entering its sixth month and China lobbing missiles over Taiwan last weekend, higher military spending across the globe is on the way.… Read more