Contrarian Income Mailbag: Your Questions, My Answers

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Thank you to our 1,578 Contrarian Income Report subscribers who attended our Q1 webcast a couple of weeks back!

We have you, our thoughtful reader and income investor, to thank for the inspiration behind the firehose. We received 114 questions during our one-hour call, plus several more beforehand. Amazing.

As promised, I have read each and every question (as has our excellent customer service team). Last week, we chatted about CEFs. Let’s tackle some dividend stock questions today.

Q: I love your overall dividend approach. I have some cash on the sideline expecting a correction. Any thoughts on the timing and percentage dip of that correction?Read more

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We’re just three weeks into 2020 and it’s already a dividend wasteland!

Happy New Year! Enjoy Your 1.7% Dividend

Drop $500K into the typical (miserly) S&P 500 stock today and you get a pathetic $713 a month in dividend payouts. That’s no retirement; it might cover the cost of your commute and coffee on the way to your job as a Walmart (WMT) greeter—so long as you avoid going to Starbucks (SBUX)!

Treasuries? Forget it. At a 1.8% yield, we’re not retiring on them, either.

No wonder I hear from so many investors wary of putting their cash in a market yielding less than inflation.… Read more

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Insider buying can be a great indicator for us income investors to buy alongside management. After all, when the big bosses reach into their own pockets to purchase their own payout streams, it’s a signal that they are confident in more than just the next dividend.

They believe their stock has upside, too. Often this results in total returns (including dividends) up to 214%. I’ll show you some examples, and also break down some current “buy” signals, in a moment.

First, let me make sure we are not mixing up insider buying with insider trading. They are two different things.… Read more

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Thanks to the December selloff, it’s relatively easy to find 9% yields. The stock market was a relentlessly receding tide in the fourth quarter, which is bad for “buy and hope” investors but quite helpful for income specialists like us.

Let’s look first at real estate investment trusts (REITs). Many now pay 9% – some good, some bad. The main index Vanguard Real Estate ETF (VNQ) has only paid this much (4.9%) twice before in the past ten years:

VNQ Is Rarely This Generous

By cherry picking the lot we can find 49 stocks paying 9% or more. But we should avoid names like Government Properties Income Trust (GOV), which frequently pops up on cute recession-proof dividend lists.… Read more

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Most “first-level investors” believe that investing is an either-or proposition. A stock or fund can deliver eye-popping yield … or it can deliver breakneck growth. But not both.

That’s simply not true. We’ll prove that today by highlighting three stocks yielding 6% to 9% with 20% price upside to boot.

Remember, total returns are made up of dividends and price appreciation. The latter, price gains, are driven by some combination of:

  1. Dividend raises (which inspire investors to pay more for the stock or fund), and/or
  2. A climb towards fair value (a closing of the discount window in a closed-end fund’s (CEF’s) case, or a higher multiple on FFO for a REIT).


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