A big “thank you” to the 1,358 subscribers who attended our How to Bank 20% Returns (Plus Sky-High Yields!) in 2020 with Safe Dividend Stocks webcast last Wednesday! We had a lively question and answer session. I love the enthusiasm!

Let’s use our time together today to review some of the questions that kept popping up.

Q: In terms of expected returns, what is the difference between your Contrarian Income Report, Hidden Yields and new Dividend Swing Trader strategies?

Our Contrarian Income Report service is designed to maximize the income you receive from your portfolio today. In CIR, we’re fattening up your monthly and quarterly dividend checks as much as we can without sacrificing principal.… Read more

I hope last week’s Iran head-fake didn’t have you thinking about buying so-called “safe” dividends like Treasuries. Because these tired income standbys aren’t safe at all!

With your nest egg yielding a pathetic 1.9%, you’re guaranteed losses, with inflation running at 2.1%. So today we’re going to make a simple contrarian move that will:

• Hand us huge 8.6%+ cash dividends—nearly five times what Treasuries pay.
• Pay us every month, not every quarter.
• Set us up for nice price gains “on the side,” and …
• Give us “Iran insurance,” helping shield our nest egg against swift drops triggered by global instability, an economic downturn—any reason, really.

Today we’re going to talk about the biggest threat to your portfolio (and dividends!) you face in 2020.

It’s not a recession. It’s a near-irresistible human impulse—purposely amped up by the financial press—that could lock in big losses for you, or cause you to miss out on a huge gain, like the 486%+ some investors left on the table.

Let’s talk about that now. It starts with all the doom-and-gloom stories you’ve likely read about a looming market crash lately. (They’re hard to miss: you can find at least one on most major news sites every day.)

First off, don’t believe the hype: truth is, there’s a lot of data saying we aren’t anywhere near a downtick, let alone a full-blown once-in-a-lifetime collapse.… Read more

The “race to zero” heats up again. You’ve surely heard that Vanguard is now slicing and dicing its already-low fees and commissions. That sounds great, but in reality, the low-fee race is pennywise yet dividend-foolish for us income investors.

To retire on secure, high-yielding long-term investments, we actually prefer to pay a fair management fee. I’ll outline this in a moment via a trio of secure 7% payers. Their generous yields tower above mainstream low-fee options:

More on these three dividend funds in a minute. First, let’s review why we prefer to pay for professional management.

Vanguard kicked off the new trading year by joining the “no-commission” fray that caught the likes of Charles Schwab (SCHW) and E*Trade (ETFC) by surprise in 2019.… Read more

What’s does 2020 hold for your utility stocks (and closed-end funds)? Will these steady income plays hand us another round of big gains and dividends? Or is there trouble ahead?

These are reasonable questions to ask after these “boring” stocks poured on a huge—and rather “un-utility-like”—26% total return last year:

Utilities or Exploding Small Caps? Tough to Tell.

Let’s dive into three critical factors that will tell the tale for utilities in 2020. And because it’s the season for forecasts, I’ll throw in my verdict on the sector for the coming year, too, and name five utility closed-end funds (CEFs) paying huge dividends of 6.3% to 9.4%.… Read more

Successful dividend investing is simple, though not necessarily easy. There are nuances which trip up many investors (including most professionals!). These twists and turns create “yield alpha” opportunities for contrarian-minded income investors like us.

If everyone else in the market were perfectly grounded and calculated, there would be no chance for us to make above-average returns. After all, the 11.8% and 18.8% annualized returns that my Contrarian Income Report and Hidden Yields readers are earning would be snapped up in a perfectly efficient market.

Thanks to these inefficiencies, we are able to bank big yields and price gains in Dividend Land.… Read more

Let’s cut through the thousands of market predictions out there and dive into what’s really ahead for your dividends in 2020. We’ll also discuss two things that should be high on your “must have” list for any dividend stock you buy this year.

In fact, these two easy-to-spot indicators handed one group of investors a 91.6% return, with less volatility than your typical investor saw. I’ll show you how they did it shortly. First, let’s talk about my outlook for the year ahead.

My 2020 Outlook 

Here’s why most market predictions miss the mark: the pundits simply look at what happened in the past year and spit out a forecast based on that.… Read more

Think we’re stuck with pathetic dividends and sluggish growth in 2020?

I get it. Many folks I talk to see the coming year this way. Some are even selling stocks, in a doomed effort to “lock in” gains. The problem? What the heck do you do next?

Sitting in cash means watching helplessly as inflation erodes your nest egg. And dividends? Forget it! You’ll kiss those goodbye the moment you hit the “sell” button.

Here’s the good news: you’re not stuck between the pathetic sub-2% payout on regular stocks and the 0% you’ll get in cash. There’s a better way—one that pays you huge 6%+ dividends and regularly crushes stocks!… Read more

The New Year is here, which means it’s once again time to revisit a contrarian (and income) investing tradition: The “Dogs of the Dow.”

This simple yet famous dividend strategy involves buying the 10 highest yielders in the 30-component Dow Jones Industrial Average at the beginning of each year.

It’s an income play, sure, but this strategy also has to do with value. The idea: Truly strong blue-chip stocks rarely become “obsolete,” so high yields—often driven by lower prices in the prior year—are just a signal that the stocks are oversold and due to bounce back.

It’s a win-win, in theory.… Read more

If you’ve been holding the Cohen & Steers Quality Income Realty Fund (RQI)—a fund I wrote about a lot in 2019—you’ve done very well indeed. RQI has dominated, with its market-price return surging 51.9%, including gains and dividends, since the start of 2019.

So today we’re going to take a closer look at this superstar fund to see what lies ahead, and whether it’s still worthy of your cash, even with its big 2019 gains.

If you’re not familiar with RQI, it owns real estate investment trusts (REITs), such as cell-tower owners Crown Castle International (CCI) and American Tower (AMT), warehouse landlord Prologis (PLD) and data-center REIT Equinix (EQIX).… Read more