What good is a 2% or 3% annual yield if you can lose it in a single trading session?

The Nasdaq and Russell 2000 are officially in bear markets, which means they’re down 20% from their peak. But bear markets don’t have to stop at 20%.

They can just keep on collapsing. And the weakest links can fall much, much farther than 20%.

In fact, they often do. Just take a look below at the 444 S&P 500 components that were part of the index during the 2007-09 selloff. Only a handful fell even close to the bear-market minimum.

Meanwhile, almost a quarter hemorrhaged 70% of their value or more!… Read more

Since launching my CEF Insider service in early 2017, the picks I’ve given subscribers have outperformed the broader CEF market—even through the recent market volatility that’s caused just about everything to go down.

The key to this performance is a process of analysis and selection that is both complicated and straightforward. I have a checklist of 52 points I go through to choose the right fund. I apply these one by one, first using some of the broader points to screen funds, then zooming in closer, using more complex analysis to bring you my very best buys.

While it’d take a long time to go through that entire checklist, I want to share with you a five-point system that I use as a springboard for picking winning CEFs for CEF Insider.… Read more

Thanks to the December selloff, it’s relatively easy to find 9% yields. The stock market was a relentlessly receding tide in the fourth quarter, which is bad for “buy and hope” investors but quite helpful for income specialists like us.

Let’s look first at real estate investment trusts (REITs). Many now pay 9% – some good, some bad. The main index Vanguard Real Estate ETF (VNQ) has only paid this much (4.9%) twice before in the past ten years:

VNQ Is Rarely This Generous

By cherry picking the lot we can find 49 stocks paying 9% or more. But we should avoid names like Government Properties Income Trust (GOV), which frequently pops up on cute recession-proof dividend lists.… Read more

What if I told you there’s a way you can buy your favorite blue chips and get a dividend 5 times bigger than what your typical S&P 500 name pays today?

Let’s be honest: with an income stream like that, backed by popular names like cigarette maker Altria Group (MO), telco Verizon (VZ) and even Google, now known as Alphabet (GOOGL)—more on these three stocks below—you’d leap at the chance, right?

The truth is, you’d be crazy not to.

Well, now you can. And today I’m going to show you exactly how to do it—and 1 fund yielding 9.8% to get you there instantly.… Read more

Today I’m going to show you how to get a livable income stream from a $300,000 nest egg—while growing your savings at the same time.

Sounds impossible, right?

Wrong.

What’s more, we’re going to pull it off using just six funds. When we’re done, we’ll end up with a simple, diversified portfolio that throws off an amazing, steady 10.4% dividend yield—more than five times the S&P 500 average!

And if you’re worried that this outsized yield could come at the cost of a weak total return, don’t be, because these funds have delivered 12% per year over the past decade.… Read more

Today we’re going to talk about the single biggest risk you face in your golden years.

But don’t worry—I’ll also show you how to clobber that risk and set yourself up for an easy $40,000 in cash in every year of your retirement. More on that below.

First, the risk I’m talking about is the very real chance you’ll outlive your nest egg. Because a sweeping study says you could be very wrong about the length of your retirement.

A Hidden Danger

Here’s what the numbers say: in 1992, the University of Michigan asked 26,000 Americans 50 years of age and older how long they thought they’d live.… Read more

With market volatility kicking into high gear, now is the perfect time to talk about one of the biggest questions CEF investors face: how do you know when it’s time to sell a closed-end fund (CEF)?

Unfortunately, there’s no simple answer to that question—and often investors who use conventional sell signals, like a falling market price, will end up selling at the worst time.

That leads me to my cardinal rule with CEFs: it’s easier to know when to buy than when to sell. If the fund is well managed, has a strong track record, is deeply discounted and has a relatively safe dividend, it’s generally a screaming buy.… Read more

I know it’s tempting, but right now is not the time to flee from stocks to cash. Markets are extremely oversold and due for some sort of relief rally (at least). Liquidate now and we’re no better than the average investor who underperforms by selling low after buying high.

Plus by collecting our dividends we’ll soon outpace the investors who smartly (or more likely, luckily) sold in September. Here’s why.

Studies show it’s very difficult (and really, impossible) to know when it’s time to “get back into stocks.” Hulbert Financial recently ran the numbers for Barron’s on the advisors it monitors.… Read more

Legendary investor George Soros is controversial, but his tremendous investment performance over a lifetime is indisputable. Soros attributes it to a concept called “reflexivity.”

Simply put, this refers to the tendency for market expectations to create market outcomes. For instance, when the market expects a fund to crash, it will sell off that fund, thereby causing it to crash.

Here’s the opportunity: when a fund crashes just because everyone thinks it will, the fund tends to bounce back when everyone realizes the market made a mistake.

This happens constantly in the closed-end fund (CEF) universe—a relatively small world of $300 billion in assets managed in about 500 funds.… Read more

Investors did not like what Chairman Powell and the Fed had to say this week, resulting in a 1,300-point decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Average in less than 24 hours.

When Doves Cry

As expected, the FOMC raised its short-term interest rate target on Wednesday, to a range of 2.25%-2.50%. The composite expectation of the committee for 2019 also turned more dovish, now calling for two more rate increases next year, down from three.

It’s not in the Fed’s mandate to make equity investors happy and traders quickly voiced their disapproval of the policy changes.

Prior to the announcement at 2 p.m.… Read more