These Cheap 4%+ Yielders Are Riding Every Megatrend in the Book

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These Cheap 4%+ Yielders Are Riding Every Megatrend in the Book

If we can say one thing about the rest of 2024, it’s this: We’re looking at a stock-picker’s year here—and folks who try to play it with vanilla ETFs will have a tough time.

Just look at the state of play in front of us.

The Fed is trying to thread a needle, and if economic numbers come in too hot or too cold for Goldilocks, well, good luck holding something like the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY)!

In an environment like this, a good plan is to zig when the market zags.

To do so, we’re targeting stocks in the bargain bin with “recession-resistant” strengths such as steady revenue from clients who must buy their services no matter what.… Read more

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2 Tech Funds With Huge Dividends (1 Is a Buy, 1 Is a “Wait and See”)

You probably know the Don Henley song “Dirty Laundry.” It was one of my favorite tunes in the 1980s. A criticism of media sensationalism, the repetitive chorus rang in my ears when I was much younger than I am today:

“Kick ’em when they’re up,
Kick ’em when they’re down.”

This aptly describes the nightly news of the 1980s and the financial press of the 2020s.

In early 2022, for example, Business Insider kicked tech stocks as they were going down: “Rising interest rates and expectations of strong economic growth and inflation are all key factors in the sell-off” the site wrote then, mixing up the good (“strong economic growth”) with the bad (“inflation”).… Read more

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Magnificent 7 Move Over: “Dividend 6” Yields Up to 8.3%

Magnificent Seven? Tired.

Dividend Six? Wired.

Plain vanilla investors fawn over chipmakers and AI stocks. They hope they can buy them high, and sell them higher.

Contrarian income investors like us? We focus on the companies that support the AI hype. The “pick and shovel” providers. A “Dividend Six” that plays on AI and pays $26,000 to $41,500 in dividends alone on a $500K stake.

With that we’ll say move over, Magnificent Seven—a term coined by Bank of America’s Michael Hartnett (and inspired by the classic Sturges Western) to describe the market’s predominant tech names.

Those stocks? Microsoft (MSFT), Apple (AAPL), Facebook parent Meta Platforms (META), Amazon.com… Read more

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Shootout at the AI Corral: This 11.7% Payer Is a Winner

I first saw a spaghetti western last year and am still kicking myself for not watching one sooner—A Fistful of Dollars is a masterpiece.

I’m reminded of the movie’s title because a fistful of dollars is what a lot of investors got from the so-called “Magnificent Seven”—namely Alphabet (GOOGL), Amazon.com (AMZN), Apple (AAPL), Meta Platforms (META), Microsoft (MSFT), NVIDIA Corp. (NVDA) and Tesla (TSLA)—last year.

These tech wonderkids were, of course, on a tear in 2023, jumping 75% on average and providing the bulk of the market’s gain.

The reason for that is pretty clear: artificial intelligence, which burst onto the public consciousness with the release of ChatGPT in November 2022.… Read more

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This Bad Dividend Decision Pays Up to 76%: Be Careful

Ten years ago, the city athletics director wrote:

Hi Guys,
I need to place an order for championship softball shirts. It should say West Sacramento’s Summer 2014 C/D Division Champions. Bad Decisions.

Bad Decisions was our team name, a nod to our personnel. I mean that in the most endearing way possible, of course. A lineup filled with guys light on responsibility (at the time) who enjoyed the postgame rehydration process as much as the in-game competition:

With two kids, my postgame rituals are different these days. First, a trip out can only occur after our final YMCA basketball game on Saturdays—my third and final game to coach that day.… Read more

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Let’s “Convert” Our Lame ETF Dividends Into Ironclad 8%+ Payouts

This market bounce is strangling the payouts on everybody’s favorite ETFs. But it’s also given us a sweet setup to grab another group of funds kicking out big dividends, to the tune of 9%+ yields.

Even better, many of these funds—wallflowers to “popular-kid” ETFs—were left off the invite list for the 2023 market party. That means they’re (still) cheap today.

I know a 9% payout has a lot of appeal to most folks, with Treasury yields now down to around 4%, not too far above inflation.

And if your cash is stuck in an ETF, you’re getting a lame payout, well, almost all the time, but especially if you buy now: the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY)—which, as the name says, holds the entire S&P 500 index—yields a sorry 1.4% as I write this.… Read more

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This $6-Trillion “Cash Stash” Will Ignite Stocks (and This 9.7% Dividend)

Worried stocks are going to crash after breaking fresh all-time highs?

Well, let me allay those concerns with not one, not two, but … six trillion reasons why that fate—pushed more and more in the media these days—is far from inevitable (or even likely).

That six trillion number is the hoard parked in money-market funds: those “as-good-as-cash” options for people who don’t really want to grow their money but want to keep it “safe” and have access to it.

The 2022 sell-off and rapid rise in interest rates in 2023 caused money-market balances to soar, doubling from where they were just five years ago—a far bigger increase than the historical trend.… Read more

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This $6-Trillion “Cash Stash” Will Ignite Stocks (and This 9.7% Dividend)

Worried stocks are going to crash after breaking fresh all-time highs?

Well, let me allay those concerns with not one, not two, but … six trillion reasons why that fate—pushed more and more in the media these days—is far from inevitable (or even likely).

That six trillion number is the hoard parked in money-market funds: those “as-good-as-cash” options for people who don’t really want to grow their money but want to keep it “safe” and have access to it.

The 2022 sell-off and rapid rise in interest rates in 2023 caused money-market balances to soar, doubling from where they were just five years ago—a far bigger increase than the historical trend.… Read more

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Should You Lock in These Monthly Dividends Up to 16.7%, Or Is It Too Late?

Today we’ll discuss five monthly dividends with yields between 7.3% and 16.7%. But let’s be careful—market participants are showing signs of greed right now.


Source: CNN

Monthly dividend stocks can help settle down a seasick portfolio. First, they pay every 30 days. What a concept! Their payments line up with our bills. Brilliant.

Quarterly payers aren’t as nice. Let’s look at a $500,000 portfolio split evenly among a group of five mega-cap dividend payers. This is a set of wildly popular blue chips you can find in the top 10 or top 20 holdings of just about every major large-cap fund—and despite this, they deliver a downright miserly sub-1% yield!… Read more

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Forget What You Know About Dividend Investing (This Changes Everything)

These days, I’m seeing something I’ve frankly never seen before in the markets: a lot of people questioning so-called investment “truths” they thought were frankly unmovable.

Most people’s natural instinct is to withdraw in times like these, but that would be a mistake in this case, especially for closed-end fund (CEF) investors, as it may result in funds that seem to always trade at a discount suddenly seeing those “eternal” sales come to a swift end.

I know that’s quite a bit to unpack, so let’s start with the skepticism that seems to be rolling through the markets today, starting with the S&P 500’s new—and long-awaited—all-time high.… Read more

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