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Election. Recession. No landing. Social unrest. Election contest.

Low beta, anyone?

Today we’ll talk calm in a sea of manic. A six-pack of tranquil dividend payers yielding up to 8.9%.

How do we know they’re tranquil? Beta, baby.

A stock with a beta above 1 is considered more volatile than “the market.”

A stock with a beta below 1 is considered less volatile.

Let’s say a stock had a beta of 0.5. This means it’s half as volatile as the market. If a 30% bear market swipes, this safety stock only loses 15%.

It’s an inexact science—I wouldn’t build projections per se around current beta.… Read more

One often-overlooked way for closed-end funds (CEFs) to give us a profit boost is for management to buy back a fund’s shares.

By now, buybacks are probably familiar to most investors: With “regular” stocks, buybacks reduce a company’s share count, which boosts earnings per share and other per-share metrics, indirectly boosting share prices.

With CEFs, buybacks have a bit of a different effect. With these high-yielding funds, we want to focus instead on how buybacks affect the discount to net asset value (NAV, or the value of a CEF’s underlying portfolio).

Buybacks, Fixed Share Counts Help Management “Control” CEF Discounts

Members of my CEF Insider service know that we love discounts to NAV because they’re the primary indicator of CEF value.… Read more

Many investors are worried about a recession. Or The Federal Reserve easing too fast. Or not fast enough!

And then we have the upcoming election. Buckle up, my fellow contrarian.

Fair enough. But let’s remember that headline worries are usually priced in. The popular “threatdown” rarely thwarts the market.

On the other hand, we contrarians fret about the scenario that may come out of left field. We worry not about a hard landing. Or a soft landing. The underappreciated risk is the no landing that reignites inflation.

Rates down, assets up—let the good times roll! It will be fun for a while.… Read more

If you’re like me, when you see an outsized dividend yield, you stop for a second and immediately do the mental math. How much would we get back in payouts from, say, a 9.3% payer if we were to invest $10,000? Or $20,000? Or $100,000?

But savvy contrarians we are, we know to push back on this initial reaction and look deeper.

Because (as we contrarians know), those big yields can (and usually are) a danger sign.

Truth is, a rising dividend is only one possible reason for a high payout.

In fact, it’s the least likely one.

More often, a high yield stems from something we want no part of: a plunging share price.… Read more

If you’re as bullish on oil as I am, let’s look past vanilla bean favorites like Exxon Mobil (XOM) and Chevron (CVX). Great companies but a bit pricey, as they only yield 3% to 4%.

We’re better off with diversified energy funds that dish dividends up to 9%. Now we’re talking!

The conditions are right for another push ahead in energy’s crash-‘n’-rally cycle. The Middle East (‘nuff said). The Federal Reserve careening towards a “no landing” scenario. And the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) joining the global money printing party.

It could be high time for Texas tea’s next leg higher.… Read more

I get it if you’re a bit wary of this latest market rally: We’ve got a volatile (to say the least!) election now days away. And while the Fed says rates are headed lower, there’s still a lingering uncertainty about where, exactly, they’ll land.

While a bit of anxiety is understandable, we do not want to make the same mistake many “vanilla” investors do at times like these: go all into cash.

For one, humans are terrible at predicting the future—remember those warnings of a 100% chance of a recession in 2023?—so safe to say a good number of today’s investment worries are unlikely to come to pass.… Read more

I have to laugh when I hear a pundit say that individual investors can’t beat the S&P 500 (and you and I both know this is something we hear quite regularly!).

Truth is, it’s not that hard. Heck, you really only have to choose an ETF from a different sector, like real estate investment trusts (REITs)!

REITs Beat Stocks in the Long Run

As you can see, these “landlords”—shown by the performance of the benchmark SPDR Dow Jones REIT ETF (RWR) in purple above—have easily outpaced the S&P 500 for the 20 years following the ETF’s inception back in 2001.

That outperformance occurred even with the subprime-mortgage crisis (which was obviously real estate focused) and the pandemic selloff (which hit REITs particularly hard, shuttering malls, warehouses and offices across the world).… Read more

“If you own dividend-paying stocks, you’d be a fool to not be using Income Calendar,” my man Mark P. from California writes.

Tell ‘em, Mark!

We are devoted to retiring on dividends here at Contrarian Outlook. But a little bit of work in retirement is OK. As income investors, we should be able to project our income.

Note that I said a little bit of work. Not a lot! I am not interested in fiddling with spreadsheets until the end of time, and neither is my man Mark.

If you’re with us, why not hop onboard the Income Calendar train with Mark and me?… Read more

Last week’s oil-price drop has set us up to buy some top-flight energy dividends on the cheap. We’re going to grab one with a “hidden” 10.3% yield in just a moment.

First, this buy window goes well beyond a dip in the price of the goo. Fact is, oil dropped because things calmed (slightly) in the Middle East.

But of course, that can change again, and quickly. The real oil story for us is that the drop (along with a double-digit decline in natural-gas prices since the start of October) is happening as energy demand is set to rise.

So desperate is the need for energy these days that Big Tech is turning to long-shuttered nuclear reactors.… Read more

Last year, the White House published a blog post titled “As the US Consumer Goes, So Goes the US Economy.”

No matter what your politics are, I think we can all agree that America’s economy depends on consumers buying things. For us income investors, then, the consumer’s health is a key thing to watch, as it ultimately sets the direction of stocks.

So how healthy is the US consumer today, and can we confidently buy stocks—and better still, high-yielding CEFs like the one we’ll talk about below (current yield: 10%)?

Often, the signals are murky. America is, after all, a big country with a lot of people in it, and some of those people are obviously doing better than others, so it’s tricky to zero in on the overall health of consumers.… Read more