I was talking with an old college buddy the other day, and he was lamenting his recent investment performance. Up until a few years ago, he could do no wrong chasing the latest hot trade in small-cap biotech stocks.

We’re not talking beer money winnings, either. We’re talking life-changing money. My friend’s best trade to date was buying 5,000 shares of Pacific Biosciences (PACB) in the early days of the pandemic at $3.50 a share …. then selling half of it at around $35 a share last year!

That’s $70,000 in profits in less than two years.

On one trade.

Of course, things have been much harder for him in 2022.… Read more

There’s nothing we closed-end fund investors love more than finding a smartly run fund in an unfairly beaten-down sector. This hands us a nice discount (of course!), plus a much bigger dividend, because yields and prices move in opposite directions.

In fact, with CEFs, we’re actually getting a “double discount”: one from the depressed sector and one from the CEF’s discount to net asset value (NAV, or the value of the stocks in its portfolio). This indicator only exists with CEFs, and we’ll cover 4 with particularly attractive discounts to NAV in a second.

Plus, CEFs already boast yields that triple (or more) those of regular stocks, so deep-discounted CEFs give you an income stream that’s bigger still.… Read more

Relax. You might already have enough money to retire on.

My favorite dividend stocks let people retire comfortably on $500,000 or so.

Got more cash? Great! You’re in elite company.

Fidelity Investments—apparently happy to share its customer’s financial info anonymously—says it has more than 750,000 seven-figure 401(k) and IRA accounts.

That sounds like a lot, but it means less than 1% of Americans have $1 million or more saved for retirement. And that’s OK—select dividend stocks can help us retire comfortably on $500,000 or so.

Sure, a chunk of money is great. Especially when we can leave it untouched and let it grow.… Read more

Beware of Wall Street “wisdom” now more than ever. Especially when it comes to the most commonly quoted maxim for retirement: it’s based on a rule that was never designed for times like these!

I’m talking about the so-called “4% rule,” which says you should sell 4% of your nest egg every year in retirement.

Sounds simple, right?

Trouble is, it slashes your income stream and caps your upside in one go! It’s especially dangerous advice to follow in a downturn like the one that’s hit us in the last few months.

Let’s say, for example, you own $200,000 worth of Cisco Systems (CSCO) shares.… Read more

One thing we love about closed-end funds (beyond the dividends: many CEFs yield 7%+ today) is the big discounts to net asset value, or NAV, that these funds hand us.

These discounts only exist with CEFs. Here’s why: CEFs typically can’t issue new shares to new investors after their IPOs, so their shares get bid up and down on the market, independent of how much their portfolios are actually worth.

These discounts can get quite wide—sometimes 20% and higher. At that kind of a discount, we’re essentially paying 78 cents for every dollar of assets the fund holds!

Our plan, then, is simple: buy when we get an unusual discount like that and then ride along as it vanishes.… Read more

Here’s the surest, safest way to double our money in any kind of market. This works whether we’re comparing 2019’s roaring bull run or 2022’s blabbering bear:

Buy the dividends that are growing the fastest.

Over long time periods (months to years), stock prices follow their dividends. For better or for worse! It’s that simple.

When a company cuts its payout, its stock price drops. On the other hand, firms that raise their dividends year after year enjoy steady annual gains. This is thanks to a financial phenomenon I call “the dividend magnet.”

The Dividend Magnet

Dividend growth is a one-two-three combo for income investors.… Read more

I was doing some investment research yesterday, and found myself sifting through a list of the best-performing investments of the 2022 so far. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they’re all incredibly aggressive instruments – arcane cryptocurrencies, 3X leveraged oil ETFs and the like – that rely on luck as much as anything else.

Anyone looking for proof that past performance is no guarantee of future returns, look no further than that list.

A single Millennial with just a few thousand bucks in their account may not be afraid of these incredibly risky bets. But that’s just because they haven’t learned their lessons yet.  Veteran investors know that for every trade generating instant gains … there are hundreds of others that cause instant regret.… Read more

These days, everyone is on guard for a recession. And the inverted yield curve is only adding to those fears.

Sure, a recession may be in the offing, but I don’t see one starting anytime soon. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen a recession hit when corporate profits are soaring like they are today—up 40% from pre-pandemic levels and forecast to keep rising:

Source: Wells Fargo Economics

This “profits-up, stocks-down” dynamic (the S&P 500 is still down about 4% from the start of the year as I write this) makes now a good time to buy, particularly if you’re doing so through my favorite high-yield investments: closed-end funds (CEFs), like the one we’ll discuss below.… Read more

Floating-rate bonds are supposed to be sailing right now.

So why are they sinking?

Last week we lamented the reason most bond funds are down this year. The runaway long rate is to blame.

Ten-year Treasury bonds began the year yielding 1.5%. Now, they pay 2.4%, a whopping 60% more in a quarter!

Nobody wants the 1.5% vintage when they can “level up” to 2.4%. So the old 1.5% bonds, while still paying their coupons, lose value.

So do funds that own Treasuries. The iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF (TLT), one of the most popular bond tickers on the planet, is down 10% year-to-date.… Read more

In just over a month, the script has flipped for us dividend investors: Russia’s war on Ukraine has cleaved the world into two teams: east vs. west.

Some pundits have dubbed it Cold War 2.0. But whatever you call it, I think you’ll agree that the risks in this new arrangement are higher for us: we’re likely looking at another pop in the inflation rate, for one, due to (seemingly) never-ending supply-chain issues.

So it follows that Fed Chair Jay Powell will probably hike interest rates further than he otherwise would have as he tries to fix those supply-chain problems by making borrowing more expensive (if you can follow the logic there, please let me know, because it beats me!).… Read more