As we grind on into the second half of the year, the gloomy headlines about inflation and a bear market seem to be getting darker. There’s now talk of the housing market cooling off, and in some corners even chatter about a potential recession.

But if you’re a serious investor instead of a day trader with a short attention span, there’s no reason for you to freak out and hide in a bunker. True investing success depends on looking beyond short-term cycles, and instead focus on long-term income.

I’m not saying that makes it easy. It’s always a challenge to find reliable investments, and even more so in this environment.… Read more

After a 30% drop this year, tech is the last sector most folks want to invest in—which makes it a superb hunting ground for us contrarian dividend investors.

Even so, we need to be careful in this Fed-spooked environment, where near-term volatility is certain, so we’re going to hedge our tech investments by focusing on a type of closed-end fund (CEF) that gives us the following:

• An outsized 8%+ dividend that can see us through rough markets without having to sell shares, and …

• The ability to actually profit when markets get rough.

We get both of these rare strengths in the Nuveen Nasdaq 100 Dynamic Overwrite Fund (QQQX), a CEF whose vitals we’ll delve into in a bit.… Read more

You’ll probably get hyped, boy, ‘cause you know you can’t 
You can’t touch this
Ring the bell, school’s back in
Break it down!
Stop, Hammer time!

Rapper and dancer Stanley Kirk Burrell—better known as MC Hammer—penned this poetic verse in his 1990 hit “U Can’t Touch This.” (Rick James shares songwriting credits, by the way, because Hammer borrowed James’ opening riff from “Super Freak.” Thanks to Wikipedia for clarifying something I’d always wondered about but never took the time to look up.)

Been awhile since you thought about Hammer? Maybe it’s time to start tuning your dial over to the 90s on 9 and Downtown Julie Brown next time you make a trade.… Read more

A stock’s current yield holds an almost untouchable place in most investors’ minds. But here’s the thing: it’s lying to you.

My take: you’re much better off going by a company’s shareholder yield, which tells the full story on the payout we get.

Shareholder what?

We’ll get into exactly what shareholder yield means for us in a second. But we first need to look at how going by a stock’s current yield alone can steer you into a ditch.

Lumen Technologies Shows How a High Yield Can Be a Trap …

Consider regional telecom operator Lumen Technologies (LUMN), which we discussed last week in our third article on my proven “Dividend Magnet” investing strategy.… Read more

Demand for rental property is literally going through the roof—and we can play the trend for a rock-solid 7% dividend that can be had at a discount!

What’s driving this opportunity? Higher interest rates. As you can see below, the average 30-year mortgage issued today bears an interest rate near 5%, a level we haven’t come close to since the subprime-mortgage crisis.

Mortgage Rates Soar

The trend is so aggressive that it’s getting analysts and journalists into full-blown panic mode, as they begin to report on what I call “seller’s remorse.”

Seeing how rates are soaring and home values are hitting a bump, sellers are already reducing their asking prices and looking to offload property as fast as possible.… Read more

Some of the greatest dividend growers on the planet are cheaper than they’ve been in many years. Plus, these blue-chip yield machines finally pay.

The problem with bull markets is that they whittle yields down to nothing. Enter the bear, a dividend growth investor’s best friend. These fantastic stocks are finally in the bargain bin.

Today we’re going to do more than highlight one or two. We’re going to fawn over 47 companies about to raise their dividends.

These stocks are set to grow for years to come thanks to their “dividend magnets.” This is a tactic used to identify a three-pronged way to win with stocks:

1. Growing payouts = growing yields over time.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s been a flurry of doom-and-gloom articles making the rounds that all preach the same thing: anyone looking to retire now faces a bleak time of it indeed.

To that I say: nonsense! Below I’ll show you three closed-end funds (CEFs) whose yields are so high right now (up to 11.2%) that buying them and living off their rich payouts has rarely been this attractive.

We’ll talk more about these three funds, and the many benefits CEFs offer retirees, shortly. First, let’s talk about the “retirement alarmism” we’re seeing in the media today. Because these articles (all driven by the fact that fearsome headlines get clicks) suggest that a mix of high inflation and still-high stock valuations will result in retirees facing much lower “safe withdrawal rates,” or SWRs.… Read more

Just when I thought 2022 couldn’t get any stranger, my inflation research led me to a bold but inescapable conclusion. We’re living a financial prophecy foretold by the gameshow The Price is Right.

Cliff Hangers, to be specific, teaches the 2022 monetary scene perfectly.

The contest features a climber moving from left to right along an upward-sloping mountain, with a scale of 0 to 25. The contestant bids on a few household items, and the climber moves by the number of dollars the guess misses by.

A perfect bid and the climber will stay put. Off by $10, and the climber will move up 10.… Read more

Most investors ignore the “magnetic” connection between dividends and share prices. It’s causing them to miss out on huge gains—and setting them up for big losses, too.

Here’s what I mean: in my earlier article in our ongoing series on my “Dividend Magnet” approach to investing, I gave you example after example of how a rising dividend almost inevitably drags a company’s share price up with it.

This is one of the main reasons why we demand a dividend that’s not only growing but accelerating in my Hidden Yields dividend-growth service.

It’s clear as a bell in the chart of Texas Instruments (TXN), below, one of the examples we discussed in our previous article.… Read more

Thanks to the selloff, it’s possible to buy closed-end funds (CEFs) at such high yields that we can do what seemed unthinkable just a few months ago: build a CEF portfolio that will pay $5,000 a month in dividends on about $540k invested.

That’s an 11.1% average yield!

This, of course, is because many CEFs have been caught up in the selloff, and yields move inversely to prices. So a fund that may have yielded, say, 7% six months ago (which is about the long-term CEF average) is suddenly yielding a lot more now.

In addition, it’s possible to build an income stream this big with just three CEFs.… Read more