My “Made for 2024” Dividend Plan

Our Archive

Search completed

Many investors are worried. About a hard economic landing. The Federal Reserve keeping rates high. The 2024 election.

Fair enough. Fortunately, the headline worries are usually priced in. The popular “threatdown” rarely thwarts the market.

On the other hand, we contrarians fret about the scenario that may come out of left field. We worry not about a hard landing. Or a soft landing. The underappreciated risk is the no landing that reignites inflation.

Rates down, assets up—let the good times roll! It will be fun for a while. Until prices skyrocket again.

Fed Chair Jay Powell has officially pivoted from his hawkish stance.… Read more

Read More

Look, our dividends—and the profits that power them—are set to soar in ’24. So it’s prime time for us to shift our returns away from whipsawing share-price action like this:

A Brutal 2 Years—Capped With a Loss

This is the wild ride folks who bought an S&P 500 index fund have been on over the last two years. And what “thanks” did they get for riding that particular roller-coaster?

A loss! They’re still in the red.

Instead, we’re going to shift our profits toward the smooth and steady hum of dividend growth. Check out this sweet “dividend escalator” from insurer UnitedHealth Group (UNH)—more on UNH in a second—showing the company’s incredible 571% payout growth in the past decade:

The Dividend Staircase We’ll Climb—Starting in ’24

Why Dividends Are Primed for Growth

The upshot here is that almost nobody makes the connection between dividends and share prices.… Read more

Read More

If I can give you just one piece of advice as we pass the midpoint of 2023, it’s this: do not trust your dividend income to ETFs!

Instead, look to the simple “payout-powered” strategy we’ll talk about in a second. As we’ll see, it generated a tidy 83% gain for readers of my Hidden Yields service in just over two years.

Now is the perfect time to put it to work again, with corporate earnings—and dividends—likely to rise next year after slumping a forecast 16% in 2023, according to a recent report from Morgan Stanley (MS). For 2024, the bank is calling for S&P profits to soar 23%, then tack on another 10% gain in 2025.… Read more

Read More

One of the most difficult things for me in 2022 was that, with all the doom and gloom in the air, I heard about a lot of people giving up on the dream of financial independence.

The worst part was that they were doing so at exactly the wrong time—right when the market decline had driven the yields on our favorite closed-end funds (CEFs) way up. Even now, after the S&P 500 has posted roughly 15% gains in 2023, as of this writing, plenty of CEFs yield 10%+, including nine in the portfolio of our CEF Insider service.

Worse, these folks were doing it because they’d bought into the media’s false narrative that a recession was looming, a trap I regularly warned about falling into here on Contrarian Outlook and in the pages of CEF Insider.Read more

Read More

Worried the economy is teetering on the brink? I don’t blame you.

Rather than running for the hills, let’s focus on recession-resistant dividend stocks. Big payout growers. We’re talking 25% to 56% dividend growth (yes, that’s no typo).

The safest dividend is the one growing the fastest. Take UnitedHealth Group (UNH), the largest health insurance carrier in the US. Its business is beautifully recession resistant. As a result, UNH is one of the most consistent growth stocks out there. Mark it down for 10%+ gains, per year, every year.

Gains in what? Every metric that matters. UNH’s sales soared 13% year-over-year.… Read more

Read More

We’re all about the dividends here at Contrarian Outlook. Often we take it for granted that we’re not looking to lose 17% in just a few weeks while we collect income!

BAC Reaches (and Reaches!) for a Bottom …

The share-price chart for Bank of America (BAC) may appeal to dividend dumpster divers. And heck, it may work, as BAC stands to gain as more people pull their savings from regional banks and plunk them into “too big to fail.”

Why deal with this nonsense? This is exactly why we’re fading “cardiac” price charts like BAC’s and shifting toward the smooth and steady growth of dividends:

… While We Climb the “Dividend Staircase”

That’s more like it!… Read more

Read More

We have plenty of cheap dividend stocks to buy today. But which ones are really bargains—and which are cheap for a reason?

The P/E ratio won’t tip us off. We’re heading into a recession. That “E” stands for earnings. Profits can disappear quickly if we’re not careful.

Let’s look past the vanilla headline metrics and instead search where almost no one else does. Let’s have what the corporate insiders are having.

This strategy can set us up for 275% gains or more. We’ll discuss why in a moment, featuring a trio of bullish factors that are lining up for a select group of stocks.… Read more

Read More

Welcome back to Contrarian Outlook, the only dividend research service focused on 6% weekly returns.

What a formula! Wash any 2022 losses away with this swift “6% every seven days” solution.

I kid, of course. This rate of return, while not sustainable, sure is nice when it happens. Especially in a dumpster fire market like this one.

So thank you, UnitedHealth Group (UNH)! In these pages last week, we called out UNH as a recession-resistant stock because the health carrier is always growing EPS at a 10% annualized rate.

Thanks to these profit gains, UNH’s dividend has been doubling every few years.… Read more

Read More

Some losses are just so bad it is dead money…

Look, I know several of you got into some sketchy stocks over the past couple of years. I’m not naming names but c’mon, as a dad of two young ones, I can tell when something is amiss.

Our safe dividend stocks have held up better than, well, just about anything else in this market. We’ve been cautious since late ’21, booking profits along the way. As the market topped, we sold early and often to raise cash.

So if you’re writing to me about dead money, let’s face it, you got into something bad.… Read more

Read More

Today I’m going to show you a two-part dividend-growth strategy that actually made money for one group of investors in the disastrous year that was 2008. It’s an appropriate investing strategy for us to follow now, with the Federal Reserve likely to raise rates until we end up in a recession (assuming, of course, that we’re not in one already!)

Before we get into the specifics on this technique and an example stock, I want to level with you. I do believe that stocks are heading lower still before they ultimately head higher.

That said, if we look one year out from today, I like our chances.… Read more

Read More

Categories