Thank you to our 1,578 Contrarian Income Report subscribers who attended our Q1 webcast last week! We received 114 questions during our one-hour call, plus several dozen more beforehand. Amazing.

Thank you for the thoughtful questions. I’ve read each and every one. Let’s chat about popular closed-end fund (CEF) topics today. (Next week, we’ll circle back with your equity-focused dividend questions.)

Q: Brett, what are your thoughts about Calamos Convertible Funds (such as CCD, CHI and CHY), which are currently yielding about 8%? Thank you.

Convertible bonds are a big beneficiary of Jay Powell’s money printing activity. Convertibles pay regular interest.… Read more

Most people don’t realize it, but there are 500 funds out there paying massive dividends: I’m talking rich 7% payouts on average.

That’s five times more than index funds pay! And many of these 500 criminally overlooked funds clobber their benchmarks, too.

I’m talking about closed-end funds (CEFs), which are run by real human beings, not algorithms. And despite what most advisors will tell you, the stock-pickers running CEFs beat the market on the regular.

To see what I mean, consider two CEFs: the  Duff & Phelps Utility & Infrastructure Fund (DPG), which holds utility stocks  like NextEra Energy (NEE) and Dominion Energy (D), and the Tekla Healthcare Opportunities Fund (THQ), holder of major drug firms like Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) and Abbott Laboratories (ABT).… Read more

If you’re not one to invest through individual stocks, a fund is the way to go. And if you invest in one totally overlooked type of fund, you can get the best of all worlds: diversification, the profit-making power only the stock market can provide—and a 7% dividend, too!

1-Click Diversification

With a fund, you get part ownership in the stocks the fund holds. And if you buy a broad-based fund like the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (VOO) or the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY), you get ownership of hundreds of companies at once. These funds’ diversity helps protect and grow your wealth, as history shows us.… Read more

As we Americans reemerge from our homes, select “return to normal” dividend payers are poised to deliver big gains. I’m talking about upside of 40% in addition to their 4% to 10% current yields.

But aren’t recovery stocks already expensive? We recently discussed how Americans aren’t exactly sleeping on the American vacation. The Invesco Dynamic Leisure and Entertainment ETF (PEJ), which includes restaurants, hotels, casinos and more, has gone skyward of late—and it’s not alone.

A quick look at some of the best ETFs over the past three months shows where investors believe the reopening money is heading:

Unfortunately for income investors, these industries tend not to pay dividends.… Read more

Let’s talk about inflation for a moment, because worries over rising prices are boiling over, and we contrarians can work them to our advantage.

If you’ve been watching the markets—and I’m guessing you have—you know that the rising 10-year Treasury yield, and the specter of inflation it brings, has weighed on stocks—particularly tech stocks.

Inflation Worries Weigh on Tech

As you can see, the tech-heavy NASDAQ, which outperforms the S&P 500 over just about any timeline, has fallen well behind in 2021 as of this writing. Meantime, Treasury rates continue their climb.

Inflation Pressures Rise

Here’s where the story gets interesting, because normally inflation fears trigger a rush into gold—but that’s just not happening this time.… Read more

What a time to be alive! The stock market is booming, and many of our favorite income investments are ticking higher every day.

Sure, we need to credit all of the money that our intrepid Fed chair Jay Powell has printed in the last year. But with the 10-year rate spiking, we now need to ask ourselves:

Is inflation here already?

Recently, I noted that Fed Chair Jay Powell was doing quite the impression of the infamous 1700s economist John Law, who was the original money printer. (And noted gambler, womanizer, speculator, and creator of multiple manias that included the Mississippi Bubble and South Sea Bubble.… Read more

Tech stocks have finally taken a breather—and we’re going to pounce on this dip—and grab a rare “double discount” while we’re at it.

The strategy we’re going to use also lets us “squeeze” the biggest tech names for payouts that are unheard of in the sector—I’m talking yields up to 6.3%.

Mom’s Coupon-Clipping Goes High-Tech

This approach is an ode to my mom who, to this day, refuses to pay the sticker price. If there’s a coupon to be found, she’ll find it and find another coupon to secure a double discount—even if it requires management approval to apply!

The dividend equivalent of the back-to-back coupon is buying discounted closed-end funds (CEFs) after a pullback, and that’s exactly the setup we’ve got in tech now.… Read more

One group of funds is doing something very unusual right now: they’re raising their dividends by double digits! And those huge hikes have driven the yields on some of these unsung income plays well above 7%.

Today we’re going to jump on this red-hot contrarian opportunity.

These smartly run dividend payers (and growers!) are closed-end funds (CEFs) that hold floating-rate loans. These assets are often overlooked, which is too bad, because they’re corporate bonds that do the opposite of what most bonds do. That makes them perfect buys for upside in today’s market, when “regular” corporate bonds’ prices are plunging.

Let me explain how floating-rate loans work, and how we’ll squeeze them for strong gains and growing 7%+ dividends.… Read more

The Nasdaq’s recent quick 11% slip earned the “correction” label. This alarmed many newbie investors who bought technology shares hoping they would keep heading higher.

We careful contrarians, on the other hand, welcome pullbacks like these. Being focused on income, we are now able to go shopping and secure more tech dividends per dollar.

The only “catch” is that we shouldn’t wait long to buy the bargain tech payers. Remember the Nasdaq’s bear market in late 2018? It bottomed out in less than three months.

The tech index sank even farther, much faster, in 2020, sinking 30% in just over a month.… Read more

The chicken littles fretting about inflation are ignoring something: the “bonus” $2.9 trillion that’s primed to ignite stocks—one group of stocks in particular.

The $2.9 trillion isn’t a new stimulus plan (although those seem to roll out daily). It’s the extra savings hoarded by consumers around the world. To put that in context, global GDP is about $89 trillion, so the total saved will amount to 3.3% of extra growth when it’s finally unleashed.

You’d think most economists would have already accounted for this savings glut in their projections. You’d also expect markets to price in this information. But neither is the case.… Read more