Why Elizabeth and Brian Believe in Their Own 15.8% Dividend

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Insiders may sell their shares for a variety of reasons. Usually, because they need the cash.

But execs who know “what’s up” with their company better than anyone only buy with one purpose in mind.

They believe their stock price is going higher. Or, if it’s a dividend stock, at least it is not going down anytime soon!

We’re going to highlight dividends up to 15.8% (yes, that’s no typo) with recent insider buying. This is especially notable these days because:

  • Vanilla investors are worried this is 2008, Part Deux.
  • Inflation is still running hot.
  • And stocks have been going down for 15 months and counting.

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The Silicon Valley Bank (SIVB) mess has demonstrated exactly why we need to invest in closed-end funds (CEFs): these funds yield 8.1% on average, giving us an income stream that can get us through market volatility, like we’re seeing now.

In fact, the SIVB failure shows one of the often-underappreciated aspects of CEFs: when you hold a diversified portfolio of these funds, you’re getting exposure to thousands of stocks, bonds, REITs and many other asset classes.

So even if you have an SIVB hidden in there somewhere, it will have little—and likely no—impact on your overall returns. (And subscribers to my CEF Insider service don’t need to worry—none of our funds have exposure to SIVB, and none have exposure to regional banks suffering from the contagion.)… Read more

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Generally, recessions are bullish for bonds. Which makes this 4% bond yield a “best recession bet.”

Why are we talking bonds when, over the past 18 months, they have all been crushed? Well, that’s the reason. The cure for poor bond performance is the high yields that are now staring us in the face. We look forward, not backward.

If you took our cue and used cash under your mattress as a bond proxy lately, then you are sitting pretty. Because now, we finally have attractive fixed-income yields!

Granted, safety is the key here. Remember, we are picking an economic slowdown as our catalyst.… Read more

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Right now we’ve got a terrific setup happening in Treasuries—and we’re going to use it to “flip” the near-4% yield the 10-year pays into a gaudy 7.9%+, paid monthly, to boot.

And there’s more: we’re going to give ourselves a rare “double discount” on our bond buys.

We’ll do it by taking already-discounted bonds (thanks to Jay Powell’s Dirty Harry act on rates) and applying a second discount by purchasing through two closed-end funds (CEFs) we’ll talk about in a bit.

The window to use this strategy is now open. Take a look at this chart to see what I’m getting at here:

The 10-Year Rate Bounces Off Its 4% Ceiling (Again)

Over the past 15 years, the yield on the 10-year has zoomed higher plenty of times, until it smacks into the 4% “ceiling.”… Read more

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Not many people realize this, but there’s an easy way to build a reliable 10% dividend stream (with price upside) that crushes anything stocks—or an index fund—could pay you.

I know that’s a bold claim. Truth is, ETFs are practically a religion for many folks. And it’s true that many active fund managers do fail to beat the index in stocks in any given year.

But there are also quite a few who do beat the index. Plus, many of them do it by offering a much bigger yield than the 1.8% your typical S&P 500 index fund, like the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (VOO), yields.… Read more

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Most vanilla investors like to buy stocks that are well-liked by Wall Street analysts.

This strategy, my contrarian friend, we know is a recipe for disaster.

Why? Well, firms that are already popular with stock jocks have nowhere to go but down. Discarded names, on the other hand, are where the action is because these are the next “analyst upgrade” candidates.

These prices have little downside and lots of upside!

It is difficult to find these out-of-favor plays because most analysts wear rose-colored glasses. They know how their bread gets buttered, and that’s with a bullish outlook.

Which is why a Sell rating is so darned interesting to us.… Read more

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Plenty of CEF investors worry about dividend cuts. And for sure, they’re something to keep in mind. But CEFs are not the same as stocks. When we invest in high-quality CEFs, there are a couple other things we need to remember when we catch wind of a cut:

  1. High-quality CEFs will sometimes reduce payouts by a small amount so they can redeploy capital into oversold bargains. I’ll have more to say on this in a moment, but the upshot is that it holds the potential for us to make more in gains from this move than we lose in dividends.
  2. As mentioned, these cuts are usually small, reducing the yield only a small amount (again, we’ll demonstrate this below).

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“Do you have cherries?” my buddy Ralph asked over the phone.

It was January 2021. Sports bars here in California were closed, so we naturally turned our backyard into one.

“No,” I replied. And sighed in an honest admission. “Only beer. Lots of beer.”

“No problem. I got ‘em.”

My buddy also had a mini-keg of delicious old-fashioneds. His creations were dangerously delicious. He’d begun making and aging fine adult beverages to pass time in the pandemic.

And the maraschino cherries he brought played no small role in his cocktail’s critical acclaim.

Is it five o’clock yet? Just kidding (mostly). We are talking about maraschinos in a dividend column because we finally have some bond funds worth cherry picking.… Read more

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“Do you have cherries?” my buddy Ralph asked over the phone.

It was January 2021. Sports bars here in California were closed, so we naturally turned our backyard into one.

“No,” I replied. And sighed in an honest admission. “Only beer. Lots of beer.”

“No problem. I got ‘em.”

My buddy also had a mini-keg of delicious old-fashioneds. His creations were dangerously delicious. He’d begun making and aging fine adult beverages to pass time in the pandemic.

And the maraschino cherries he brought played no small role in his cocktail’s critical acclaim.

Is it five o’clock yet? Just kidding (mostly). We are talking about maraschinos in a dividend column because we finally have some bond funds worth cherry picking.… Read more

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All of my indicators are telling me that oil is getting set to rip higher. And when it does, we’re going to be ready with two funds throwing off outsized 9% dividend yields!

How can I be so sure the goo is a coiled spring? Well, for one, the two underrated oil funds we’ll discuss below trade at huge discounts to their “true” value. Right now, we can buy them for less than 90 cents on the dollar.

That gives our oil gains an extra boost. And if oil does break lower from here—something I see as highly unlikely—we’re still getting some nice downside protection, thanks to those very same discounts.… Read more

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