Far too many investors ignore dividends, even in a bull market. When there’s a correction, like the one we’ve seen over the last few weeks, they flip the script, making safe cash dividends a lot more popular.

Luckily for us, there’s one ignored corner of the market where we can grab payouts that triple what the typical stock dribbles out.

That would be in municipal bonds, or “munis” for short. We hold one fund that owns such bonds, the RiverNorth Managed-Duration Municipal Income Fund (RMM), in our .

Munis are a kind of debt instrument issued by local governments to fund infrastructure.… Read more

We contrarians make our money by buying when things look bleak. We did that, and we’re up 149% on this excellent energy dividend.

But our strategy has suddenly become popular. Heck, I saw a front-page piece on Bloomberg.com outlining our “Crash ‘n Rally” energy strategy!

So, what do we do now?

We’ll talk about next steps for energy dividends in a moment. First, let’s recap how we got here so that we can decide if we want to order another quadruple-shot of Texas tea or step aside of the mainstream herd.

In April 2020, crude oil prices crashed. They actually hit negative territory, which means producers were paying people to take the goo off their hands.… Read more

With the market melting down, dividend stocks have built-in cushions. Unlike profitless tech shares, which rarely pay, our dividend payers’ yields go up when prices go down.

The result? Stronger price action for our favorite yield plays, thanks to attention from NASDAQ refugees.

But we need to be extra vigilant about dividend cuts. They, after all, provide a sickening “double whammy.” We lose our cash flow and some capital as the shares get repriced lower post-cut. And the drop can be even worse in panicked markets like today’s.

AT&T Investors Suffer Over and Over—From 1 Dividend Cut

AT&T (T) is a prime example.… Read more

If you’re relying on income from your portfolio, you know how annoying it is to manage a collection of quarterly dividend payers.

Take five of the most popular dividend stocks on the market today: Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Home Depot (HD), Procter & Gamble (PG) and Bank of America (BAC).

These are staples of every investor’s portfolio, but a route to a steady income stream they are not! Here’s what your monthly payouts would look like with this quintet if you held, say, $100,000 in each one, for a $500,000 total investment:

Source: CEF Insider

That’s a nightmare!… Read more

The stock market doesn’t just hand out safe yields up to 11.8%, vanilla money managers will tell you. And they are mostly right—but sometimes wrong.

When these 11.8% dividends are safe to buy, it can really pay to be contrarian.

An 11.8% yield means that a million-dollar portfolio can generate $118,000 in passive income per year. That is a solid six-figure salary to start with.

It is dividends like these that make mREITs (mortgage real estate investment trusts) so attractive. We’ll highlight three today that yield between 10.3% and 11.8%. But first, a business primer.

mREITs: Big Dividend Rewards (with Risks)

Equity REITs own and maybe even operate a number of properties, be they malls, hotels, hospitals or even driving ranges.… Read more

I always have a good laugh when the press talks about our favorite high-yield plays—closed-end funds (CEFs)—like they’re some new thing! Of course, we seasoned CEF investors have long known that these funds, which pay out average dividend yields of 7.5%, are the key to retiring on dividends alone.

(The 20 CEFs in our CEF Insider service’s portfolio do even better than that, yielding 8% as I write this, with the highest payer of the bunch paying a life-changing 9.8%.)

Nonetheless, the media continues to be floored by this news!

The latest occurrence came on February 9, when CNBC ran an article called “Retirees Seeking Income May Want to Consider Closed-End Funds.”… Read more

If you own a bond fund, it’s probably down in recent months. Let’s talk about why and walk through three popular fixed-income ideas from worst to first.

We’ll start with the iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF (TLT). TLT is the knee-jerk investment that many “first-level” investors buy when they are looking for bond exposure. Unfortunately, there are two big problems with TLT:

1. It only yields 2.1%.
2. Worse yet, its 19-year duration is drubbing its total returns.

Any kid knows that 19 years is “way too long” to hold a bond when inflation is running a hot 7.5%. (Please, somebody get these TLT investors a Contrarian Income Report subscription!)… Read more

There’s a “double shot” of upside waiting for us in real estate investment trusts (REITs) right now, and some of these companies—like the 3 we’ll discuss below—are so stuffed with cash they can’t hike payouts fast enough!

REITs are among our favorite dividend plays because:

• They’re “pass through” entities—REITs own property ranging from apartments to seniors’ homes and malls. They simply collect rent checks, take out enough to keep the buildings in good shape, then hand the rest to us.

• They pay zero corporate tax, so long as they pay out 90% of their net income as dividends. This tax “hall pass” means even more dividends (and faster dividend growth!)

We’ve got a pullback-driven (and tax-free!) dividend opportunity waiting for us now, and we can thank the Fed’s looming rate hikes for it. It’s a “safety first” closed-end fund (CEF) paying a 4.5% tax-free dividend and trading at a rare 8.4% discount to its “true” value.

This opportunity comes our way through municipal bonds, or “munis.” If you follow the market for these bonds, which are issued by state and local governments to fund infrastructure projects, you know that they’ve pulled back this year:

Munis Slip, Giving Us an “In”

A 2.9% drop, as we see here in the iShares National Muni Bond ETF (MUB), the benchmark ETF for the space, is small compared to the much bigger declines in stocks, but this is pretty rare: as an asset class, muni bonds are less volatile than other kinds of bonds, let alone stocks, which is why any short-term drop tends to be a buying opportunity.… Read more

Nearly two years ago, our Contrarian Income Report service picked up cheap oil dividends that, at the time, yielded nearly 11.8%. With oil trading at negative prices (meaning producers were paying people to take barrels off of their hands), our purchase didn’t feel warm and fuzzy. But then again, most successful contrarian trades don’t.

We recognized that oil prices were likely in the midst of a “Crash ‘n’ Rally” pattern. This is an oil-price phenomenon that has played out several times before.

We discussed this back in 2021:

Energy prices tend to “crash ’n’ rally.” The crash is quick, while the ensuing rally lasts for years.… Read more