Will This REIT Portfolio – up to 9.3% – Finally Get Off the Ground?

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We income investors like REITs (real estate investment trusts) because they are obligated to dish most of their profits to us as dividends. Today we’ll discuss five with fat yields between 8.3% and 9.3%.

When to buy REITs can be tricky. Generally speaking, we don’t want to buy them before rate hikes. Higher rates make money more expensive. REITs thrive on cheap money. So, the recent rate hiking cycle has been bad for REITs-at-large.

Rates and REITs Moved in Opposite Directions

Rate hikes appear done, which usually means it is time to buy REITs. After all, the Fed’s next move is likely to be a cut.… Read more

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Let’s talk about convertibles for a second—but not the car with a removable top that everyone thinks of when they hear that word: I’m talking about convertible bonds.

I know, a bit less flashy, right? The name causes most folks’ eyes to glaze over, but there is a (very) exciting part to this convertible-bond story: massive dividend yields. And I’m not talking the type of so-called “high” yields you get on regular stocks (3% or 4%). Or even corporate bonds, many of which pay out in the 6% to 7% range these days.

I’m talking really high yields here. Like 12% yields.Read more

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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 payouts, to the tune of 8%+ 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 an 8% payout has a lot of appeal to most folks, with Treasury yields now yielding around 4.3%. That’s not bad, but it doesn’t leave you much after you account for still-elevated 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 1.3% as I write this.… Read more

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I know that no one wants to talk about the 2020/2021 lockdowns anymore. But those dark days did do one critical thing for the high-yield corporate-bond market: made these so-called “junk bonds” too big to fail.

And investors are just starting to come around to that fact.

The takeaway is that we’ve got a nice opportunity to grab historically large, and stable, dividends from corporate-bond funds, including a closed-end fund (CEF) we’re going to focus on in this article: the PIMCO Dynamic Income Fund (PDI).

Long-time readers of my articles here on Contrarian Outlook, as well as my CEF Insider advisory, will recognize PDI.… Read more

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Would you believe, my fellow contrarian, that most of our vanilla income friends settle for utility dividends that pay quarterly?

Ha!

Unfortunately (for them) that’s no typo. There are millions of investors just like them who are OK being paid every 90 days.

Yes, ninety!

Obviously, they don’t read highbrow publications like Contrarian Outlook, where we highlight monthly dividend payers. Today we’ll discuss two that pay 8.3% and 8.6% respectively.

With yields like these, we can actually retire on dividends. Take a chunk of money that we’ve saved up and convert it into regular cash flow. A million dollars, for example, can become $83,000 or $86,000 annually in dividend income.… Read more

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Here’s a wild prediction for the rest of 2024: “sleepy” (but very high yielding) emerging-market bonds will clobber today’s high-flying AI stocks.

Sounds ridiculous, right?

Well, it’s one of those seemingly weird calls that’s absolutely on the table after the first Fed rate cut drops—a date that, if futures traders are right, will arrive as soon as June:

Interest Rates Are About to Pull a 180

Source: CME Group

Here’s where emerging-market bonds come in: When rates drop, the US dollar gets banged up—it always does. That will light a fire under EM bonds.

And given that the dollar has been en fuego for the past decade, the greenback’s drop could very well be swift.… Read more

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If you watch cable TV or visit financial websites, you no doubt hear about “overpriced” stocks and funds all the time.

A pundit will jump on TV and say something like “Tech is overvalued.” So, by extension, a tech ETF like the Technology Select Sector SPDR Fund (XLK) is overpriced, right?

Not so—at least in a technical sense. An ETF like XLK can be overpriced, but ETFs rarely are.

A fund like XLK collects money from investors and socks it away in stocks. In XLK’s case, we’re talking about big-name techs like Microsoft (MSFT), NVIDIA (NVDA) and Apple (AAPL). But with ETFs, the price you pay tends to be close to how much it would cost to buy all of those stocks separately.… Read more

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If they’re buying, we’re buying.

Or we’re at least considering it.

If there’s anything better than a big dividend, it’s one that is being gobbled up by the company’s own insiders. We’re talking about the officers, directors, and other members of the C-suite that are closer to the action than any analyst, reporter or investor could ever hope to be.

Most insiders are sitting on their hands right now. And who could blame them given the bubbly backdrop? But three management teams in particular are saying:

Our stock is cheap. Our dividend—up to 7.5%, by the way—is safe. We’re in with our own cash.Read more

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2024 may be remembered as the year the stock-market recovery “stuck.” While 2023 resuscitated stocks from their 2022 doldrums, it’s been 2024 that got the indices to hold above all-time highs.

Also, unlike 2023, this year’s gains are increasingly broad-based, with nine out of the 11 sectors of the S&P 500 up so far.

The biggest winner? The energy sector, which has been bolstered by particularly strong gains from Marathon Petroleum (MPC), Exxon Mobil (XOM) and Phillips 66 (PSX).

Energy Gains Across the Board

Is this an opportunity, especially for income-hungry investors? After all, energy stocks’ payouts can be massive, with pipelines offering yields well over 10% in many cases.… Read more

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Last month, this company cut its dividend by 48%. Five days later, its ticker was booted out of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA).

Vanilla investors fled the stock. Nonconformists like us, on the other hand, started to pay attention.

When there’s nobody left to love a dividend dog, we consider adoption. The payout was slashed 48%. This stock is 71% off its all-time highs. The Dow doesn’t love it any longer.

Sign us up for the stock that sounds like an old-time country music song, “The Ticker That’s Lost Everything.” We’ll give the herd their Nvidia (NVDA) at 36-times sales.… Read more

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