What Investors Get Wrong About CEF Fees (and Miss Out on 8%+ Yields)

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What Investors Get Wrong About CEF Fees (and Miss Out on 8%+ Yields)

Plenty of investors miss out on the huge yields (often north of 8%) that closed-end funds (CEFs) offer. There’s one simple reason why: They get way too hung up on management fees.

We’re going to look at a few reasons why that is today—and one easy way you can make those fees disappear entirely.

But first, just how high are the fees we’re talking about? Well, the average fee for all CEFs tracked by my CEF Insider service is 2.95% of assets. In contrast, the largest ETF on the planet, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY), has a fee of just 0.09%.… Read more

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This 9.7% Dividend Trounced Stocks in a Wild April. It’s Just Getting Started

About a month ago, Mike Bird, the Wall Street editor for The Economist, tweeted (or “X-ed,” I guess I should say) the following: “You have to concede that there would be a form of stupid, ridiculous beauty in the S&P 500 closing completely flat for April.”

And, well, after all the drama we saw in April, that’s pretty much where we landed.

A Wild—But in the End, Sideways—April for Stocks

I once met Mike for coffee, and he’s a friendly, intelligent person, so it’s easy for me to agree with him here: Yes, the market behaved stupidly in April, starting with the tariff selloff and ending with the first hints of a deal with China (with various back-and-forth moves on tariffs in between).… Read more

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How We’re Playing This “Ruthless Selloff” for 8%+ Dividends

The market pullback we’ve seen in the last couple of weeks really hasn’t come as a surprise to me. The economy is sending what you could—at best—call mixed signals right now. And stocks, as they do in uncertain times, are reacting.

I expect more volatility ahead, so today we’re going to talk about ways to protect ourselves while maintaining the 8%+ dividend streams we’re drawing from our favorite closed-end funds (CEFs). (Read: We’re not going to cash here.)

Instead we’re going to focus on a strategy that’s been around as long as investing itself—diversification—by putting a bit more weight on assets beyond stocks.… Read more

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My Top Market Prediction for 2025 (and a 10.1% Dividend to Profit)

For a long time now, it seems like the stock market has had a “theme of the year.” Clearly in 2024 it was AI, while 2023 was the year of recovery from 2022, which was a year of panic over a recession that never came.

This is odd, as past trends have lasted several years. From 2012 to 2014, for example, it was momentum driven by the Fed’s quantitative easing after the financial crisis. And the dot-com-bubble years spanned more or less from 1994 to 2000.

So will 2025 be another “theme year,” or will we see markets shift back to embracing longer-term trends?… Read more

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Forget the Fed: These 5 Funds LOVE Rising Rates (and Pay 7%)

A lot more investors have been emailing me lately, fearful of a market downturn. This tells me one thing: today’s market is a scared market.

But you don’t need to be scared. In fact, thanks to overhyped investor fears, you can easily lock in 7% dividends and prepare yourself for a downturn with less risk than you’d get buying stocks directly.

The key? The 5 unloved (for now) funds I’ll show you in a moment. First, though, you might be wondering why I say these funds are less risky than individual stocks.

For one, each of these 5 hold hundreds of assets, spreading your cash out in a way that a basket of a few stocks can’t.… Read more

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