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I’m hearing from a lot of dividend investors suffering from “bull-market blues”: while stocks have soared, driving up their portfolios’ value, they’re stuck on what to do with their gains—because stocks have soared (and yields have plunged)!

It’s a vicious cycle that doesn’t look like it’ll end anytime soon, and it’s even hit what are traditionally the most overlooked corners of the market.

Take my favorite high-yield investments, closed-end funds (CEFs), which regularly offer huge yields of 7% or more. CEFs invest in all sorts of things, from energy to utilities to corporate bonds and US stocks. And by and large, they’ve gotten pricey, too (but there are still some deals to be had in the space, as we’ll discuss shortly).… Read more

There is a massive desire for consumers to get back to traveling. If you’ve been to an airport lately, the only big change is that people are wearing masks; the crowds are on par with pre-pandemic levels.

And while workers are still enjoying the WFH benefits, when it comes to leisure activity, there is a huge desire to get out of the house and spend on experiences.

Although leisure travel has rebounded nicely, business-related travel has lagged behind; technology- hello Zoom (ZM) – has helped displace a lot of the expensive and often unnecessary travel expenses.

The newer wrench into the situation comes from the Delta variant, which CDC officials say is now as contagious as the Chicken Pox.… Read more

Don’t get me wrong—I love my kids. It’s just that I’ve loved “hidden yields” longer.

What are these long-term affectionate affairs of mine? These under-the-radar dividends require looking at the bigger-picture view of all the cash a company is spending on you and me. Sometimes it means looking past a low current yield and instead focusing on rampant dividend growth that will mean big income down the road.

But sometimes, that simply means looking where everyone isn’t—like five little-known stocks yielding a cool 7% on average that we’ll discuss today.

The Virtue of Hidden Stocks

To understand the power of investing in the relatively unknown, consider this quick story from a good friend of mine:

Used-car prices have skyrocketed over the past few months.… Read more

We talk a lot about discounts and dividends in our CEF Insider service. And they’re critical, of course. The need for a high dividend is obvious, especially if you’re in or near retirement. And buying a CEF at a big discount to net asset value (NAV) can slingshot us to serious price gains.

But being too focused on one number, be it the discount, the dividend or an individual stock’s P/E ratio, is what renowned contrarian Howard Marks calls “first-level thinking.” To get to the real truth of whether an investment is worth buying, we need to go deeper.

Of course, we contrarians know this.… Read more

As dividend yields and interest rates dropped in recent decades, income investors looked for ways to generate cash flow from stocks. Selling (“writing”) covered calls is one strategy that has gained attention.

It is certainly a conservative options strategy that most income investors think they should do. The math is compelling.

Here’s how it works. We would buy a dividend stock like Exxon Mobil (XOM) for its $0.87 per share quarterly payout (a 6% yield). Then we would write a covered call with a “strike” price just above the stock’s current level.

For example, XOM trades below $60 as I write.… Read more

Nice to see our friends over at Barron’s finally catching up to us on the big dividends sitting right under our noses in oil and gas!

It’s almost like the magazine’s writers are sharing a subscription to our Contrarian Income Report service, because the six stocks they cited in an article they ran last week are almost all picks in our portfolio—specifically our “crash ‘n rally” energy bucket.

(It’s not the first time’s Barron’s has shadowed us. In April, they put out a strategy for retiring on dividends, a subject we literally wrote the book on two years ago.)… Read more

Let’s shrug off today’s “dividend desert” and do something most folks think is impossible—ridiculous, even. We’re going to replace our monthly salary with a huge income stream from a group of closed-end funds (CEFs) that yield 7% or more (sometimes a lot more!).

The math here is simple: at a 7% dividend, you’ll have just shy of $3,000 ($2,917, to be precise) flowing into your account every month on a $500K investment. And yes, these dividends do flow your way monthly, right in line with your bills.

These CEFs have been paying these dividends for years, in some cases decades. And there are plenty of them, too: my CEF Insider service tracks 117 CEFs yielding over 7% and paying out every month.… Read more

By now you’ve read the headlines about CEOs sounding the foghorn about getting employees back to the office.

“WFH doesn’t work for those who want to hustle” 
– Jamie Dimon, CEO JP Morgan

“Be back by Labor Day or “we’ll have a different kind of conversation” 
– James Gorman, CEO, Morgan Stanley

The only problem? Employees don’t want to go back to the office.

Source: HBR

So, the big question: Who wins? The employer or the employees? And how does this impact any potential investments in the Office REIT space which is right smack dab in the middle of this whole tug o’ war.… Read more

The small-cap universe is offering investors one of the most elusive prizes of 2021:

A bargain.

As I recently wrote, Wall Street’s gaze has been fixated on the nearly uninterrupted yearlong rally in large-cap stocks—so much so that they appear to have ignored a full-blown correction in the small-cap Russell 2000.

Your average investor will be jazzed at the prospect of snapping up growth on the cheap, or at least cheaper. The blue-chip indices are overbought by just about every calculable metric, so even a relative bargain is a sight for sore eyes.

But craftier investors like you and I that don’t judge smaller books by their covers know that, if we know just where to look, we can get more than mere growth out of the market’s more diminutive picks.… Read more

These days I hear from a lot of CEF investors who are struggling to dig up cheap dividends. If you’re one of these folks, I get it. In fact, I’m right there with you!

Even for those of us who spend our entire day looking for CEF bargains, this market’s been a grind, making it tougher than ever to find high, reasonably priced dividends to recommend to you in CEF Insider.

(But we’re not out of luck here. Today we’re going to look at three 10%+ yielders that would make good speculative plays now, beyond the 13 attractively priced buy recommendations in our CEF Insider portfolio, which I continue to recommend for the lion’s share of your CEF investments.)… Read more