Plenty of investors miss out on the huge yields (often north of 8%) that closed-end funds (CEFs) offer. There’s one simple reason why: They get way too hung up on management fees.

We’re going to look at a few reasons why that is today—and one easy way you can make those fees disappear entirely.

But first, just how high are the fees we’re talking about? Well, the average fee for all CEFs tracked by my CEF Insider service is 2.95% of assets. In contrast, the largest ETF on the planet, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY), has a fee of just 0.09%.… Read more

Wall Street analysts have “Buy” ratings on 388 stocks in the S&P 500. That’s over 76% of the index!

Thank you, suits, for the curation. No, seriously. We contrarians are going to comb through the Holds and, even, the lone Sell:

Analysts Rate Most Stocks as “Buys”

Source: S&P Global Market Intelligence

Analyst optimism is the norm. Analysts need access, companies provide them with access. One hand washes the other, thus it is rare to see unfavorable ratings on stocks.

The problem with a Buy rating is that there is nobody left to upgrade the stock. Every delta is a downgrade.… Read more

Let me start with a prediction: the S&P 500 will gain about 5% this year—not great, but not bad, either.

This isn’t really a Nostradamus-level call: I’m simply annualizing the gain the market has posted so far in 2025, as of this writing.

We can think of this year as the middle stage of the business cycle—where inflation is cooling, the labor market is softening, and consumer spending is starting to slow (emphasis on starting to).

In other words, it’s the perfect setup for us to make sure we’re well diversified by looking at assets beyond stocks. At the top of our list?… Read more

As I’m sure you have heard, Moody’s downgraded US debt last weekend.

The stock market panic that ensued lasted for, oh, about an hour of trading.

Why did this already get shrugged off? It’s a classic empty-calorie headline. The practical impact of the downgrade to top holders of Treasuries—banks and pension funds—is nil.

Treasuries are still classified as top-grade collateral, which means banks can continue to leverage these securities. T-bills are just as good as cash for bank reserves, as they were before the downgrade. No need to scramble for new collateral.

And Treasuries still have investment-grade status, which means pension funds don’t have to make any moves.… Read more

We need to talk about one dividend grower that’s set to win big from this sudden breakout of tariff peace.

It’s an all-American stock that’s “dirt” cheap now. I’m talking about CF Industries (CF), a holding of my Hidden Yields service. CF makes fertilizers and is the world’s largest maker of ammonia, a key ingredient of fertilizer.

How do we know CF is primed to win as China and Uncle Sam take a breather?

We’re quite literally following the money here: CF’s management team is piling in with huge stock buybacks—to the tune of 20% of the company’s “float” over the last three years.… Read more

Can we still call ourselves contrarians if we buy into “mainstream” trends like the stunning growth of AI? Of course we can.

Today we’re going to do just that. But of course we’re not picking up obvious names like NVIDIA (NVDA). Instead we’re looking to an 8%-paying fund I see having even more upside than the “go-to” AI stocks everyone else is buying.

For Profitable Contrarian Investing, Think “Oblique,” Not “Direct”

The technique we’re going to use here is a very underappreciated concept called “oblique investing.”

Sounds a bit dry, I know, but it’s anything but. The idea here is, roughly speaking, to invest in big forces driving the market and shifting the economy over the foreseeable future.… Read more

Is it time to buy the dip on these dividends—which by the way yield between 5.3% and 7.6%?

Yes, the market-at-large has bounced quite a bit. But these payers remain mired in the bargain bin.

Vanilla investors who only focus on the S&P 500 have serious FOMO. They worry that they missed the pullback. The best buying opportunity, at least in terms of the plain “SPY” ETF owned by most of America, lasted only a week or two:

The S&P 500 Dip Didn’t Last Long

But there are still cheap dividend payers that haven’t rallied alongside the popular names. At least not yet.… Read more

About a month ago, Mike Bird, the Wall Street editor for The Economist, tweeted (or “X-ed,” I guess I should say) the following: “You have to concede that there would be a form of stupid, ridiculous beauty in the S&P 500 closing completely flat for April.”

And, well, after all the drama we saw in April, that’s pretty much where we landed.

A Wild—But in the End, Sideways—April for Stocks

I once met Mike for coffee, and he’s a friendly, intelligent person, so it’s easy for me to agree with him here: Yes, the market behaved stupidly in April, starting with the tariff selloff and ending with the first hints of a deal with China (with various back-and-forth moves on tariffs in between).… Read more

The UK trade deal was apparently the tasty egg roll before the main course of lower Chinese tariffs. A delightful order for this dividend grower, ready to feast on the “Peking duck” of trade agreements.

China is one of the biggest buyers of US crops, importing tens of billions of dollars of American agriculture every year. Soybeans and corn meander from Midwest farms all the way across the Pacific to feed China’s large (and growing) livestock industry. Higher US-China tariffs have weighed on US farmers’ profitability—and in turn, on business for key ag suppliers like Corteva Agriscience (CTVA).

So the “trade truce” with China (announced Monday) is quite bullish for Corteva.… Read more