Articles

One of my favorite things about the summer months is minor league baseball. You can get a dog and a beer on the cheap, most games are followed by fireworks and there’s no hour-long wait to pull out of the parking lot.

Besides, if you’re a student of baseball then there’s so much to appreciate. Talent in the big leagues makes it all look easy. And while the minors is messy at times, it makes you appreciate the importance of things like shrewd baserunning, taking pitches or placing the perfect bunt.

I love the investing version of “small ball,” too. Less flashy long-term plays may not ever become household names, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t valuable players in your portfolio as a whole.… Read more

Over the last few months, I’ve seen dividend investors make the same mistake over and over: they constantly forget that the stock market always looks forward, not backward.

Making this easy blunder now could cost you a chance to grab cheap 7%+ dividends in closed-end funds (CEFs)—and potentially set yourself up for years of steady cash payouts and price gains.

Shaking Off “Investor Shell Shock”

I know it’s tough to believe in this market bounce after the many cruel twists stocks have dealt us this year. And to be honest, it could take a long time for the market to fully find its footing.… Read more

“Brett, what do you think of SCHD?”

As soon as I heard the “C” I figured we were talking Schwab US Dividend Equity ETF (SCHD). (Your income strategist can typically “name that dividend ticker” in two beats!)

“Eh,” I replied, visibly struggling to string together a positive response to my AAII presentation attendee.

“SCHD owns some good names. A few,” I shrugged.

“It will generally keep you out of trouble.”

Safety is all the rage in 2022. Pain has been felt on both ends of the stock-and-bond spectrum.

Stocks are down because the Federal Reserve is tightening. Bonds, meanwhile, are supposed to balance the ship when stocks sink.… Read more

I hear from readers of my Hidden Yields dividend-growth service all the time—and many are wondering why their “dividend guy” has suddenly become a “cash guy”!

Truth is, there’s been nothing for us to buy! We’ve unloaded 17 positions since last October in Hidden Yields and are sitting on a big cash pile—waiting for our chance.

And that chance is coming. In fact, if you’re using dollar-cost averaging—or investing a fixed amount of money on a fixed date, in other words—to build your portfolio, now is a great time to put money toward the safest stocks you own—especially as we get closer to “stock season”: the period from November to May, when markets are typically stronger.… Read more

One nice thing—and probably the only nice thing—about the 2022 market selloff is that it’s given us dividend investors an opportunity to grab 10% yields we can count on for the long haul.

They come to us from closed-end funds (CEFs), a (too) long-neglected asset class that, frankly, is looking better and better every day for those looking to retire on dividends alone—and frankly we all should be.

I do want to emphasize the long haul here, though, because at this stage of the market correction, you can put some money to work effectively, either by picking up individual funds here and there or by dollar-cost averaging (DCA) to build up your income stream (and portfolio) at a reasonable price.… Read more

Boring is perfect when we’re talking retirement investing.

We’ll let others take the S&P 500’s sad 1.7% yield and frequent mood swings. While we direct our attention to an elite trio that yields 8.2%.

You read that right. Eight-point-two-percent per year… in dividends alone! That’s an excellent $82,000 in annual income on a million dollar portfolio. Or $41,500 on a $500K nest egg. You get the idea.

Plus our yield cushion will help soften a September selloff. (Because let’s face it, this is most likely a bear market rally we’re in the middle of.)

No, the stock market doesn’t just give out 8.2% yields for nothing.… Read more

Statistician and trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb published his book “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable” in 2007 – just months before the global financial crisis and Great Recession hit full swing. In this, and in other writings, he explores the importance of preparing for the unexpected.

After a brutal year or so on Wall Street, I recently went back to Taleb’s works. They offer some very important lessons on resilience and risk, and I highly recommend them.

But since most people prefer simple, real-world examples to a homework assignment, let me give you the Reader’s Digest version – using tobacco giant Altria Group Inc.… Read more

I get a lot of readers asking me when this market will bottom. We don’t know for sure, of course, because market bottoms are only visible in hindsight. But I would say that now is a good time to buy dividend-paying stocks—especially if you use dollar cost averaging (DCA), which you probably used to build your portfolio.

DCA (or buying a fixed amount on a fixed date throughout the year, say) is particularly effective for high-yield CEFs, which are, of course, our beat at my CEF Insider service.

That’s because of these funds’ above-average dividends and deep discounts to net asset value (NAV, or the value of the stocks in their portfolios).… Read more

Why would anyone want to pay full price for a stock?

Many common tickers can be bought for 5%, 10% and even 12% off in the closed-end fund (CEF) aisle. These discounted CEFs are the closest thing to a free lunch we have on Wall Street. And most investors don’t know about them because, well, they don’t read enough Contrarian Outlook!

CEFs are unique vehicles. They are one of the last corners of the stock market with a sweet inefficiency. Unlike their mutual fund and ETF cousins, CEFs have fixed pools of shares. Which means they can trade at premiums and discounts to the values of their underlying assets.… Read more

These days, everyone is looking for safety—and that’s got some folks pondering some pretty, er, unusual strategies that seem secure but are in fact anything but.

One such strategy is known as dividend capture, which sounds like a way to bag a company’s quarterly cash dividend without taking the risk of owning the shares. I don’t like the name because it sounds like something we dividend investors should be interested in. I don’t like the approach itself because it doesn’t really work.

The theory seems innocent enough:

1. Find a stock that is about to pay a dividend,
2. Buy it before it’s “ex-dividend date,”
3. Pocket the payout, and
4. Sell the shares after.