Protecting Our Retirement Portfolios During Times of War

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Protecting Our Retirement Portfolios During Times of War

I wish I didn’t have to write this column ever, let alone every couple of years. But this is ground we have to cover, like it or not: dividend stocks during war.

We invest in dividend stocks. There are wars and conflicts that affect our money. That’s reality.

Let’s start with last Saturday, while my daughter was in the middle of their monthly Girl Scouts meeting. I gulped at the headline on my phone: Drones heading towards Israel. Ugh.

So, on the drive to pick up my daughter, I flipped on the news in the Dadmobile. My sweety jumped into the car.… Read more

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“Natty” Is Down Big. What Comes Next Is More Exciting.

We contrarians, we’re not ashamed to admit, make our big money dumpster diving for discarded dividends.

When vanilla investors toss trash, it is often our treasure!

I have a hunch this is unfolding in the natural gas market. Prices literally can’t go much lower, which means that eventually they must go higher. Check out this chart—prices are down by 80% in one year!

Nat Gas is Dirt Cheap 

“Natty” prices have fallen from roughly $9 per million British thermal units (MMBtus) to a little more than $2, flattened by unseasonably warm weather and months of dogged supply surplus. Reuters reported in February that “depletion so far this heating season has been around half the seasonal average for the last 10 years.”… Read more

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This Stock Pays Us 12%+, Everyone Else 5.6%

“You had me at VIP,” my buddy Nick texted back to me.

Our babysitter canceled due to a last-minute illness. My wife took one for the team and kindly sent me to the Sacramento Kings game solo—which meant I had a seat to fill on 35 minutes notice.

No problem for my man, a fellow dad and fan. (I’ll let you decide the order!) Nick flipped the game off at home, kissed his own wife and kids goodbye and beelined from his house to our seats.

He only missed a few minutes of gametime because, as I alluded to at the open, we got him in through the VIP entrance.… Read more

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This Savvy Strategy Could Hand You “Serene” 11%+ Dividends

Beware of Wall Street “wisdom” now more than ever. Especially when it comes to the most commonly quoted maxim for retirement: it’s based on a rule that was never designed for times like these!

I’m talking about the so-called “4% rule,” which says you should sell 4% of your nest egg every year in retirement.

Sounds simple, right?

Trouble is, it slashes your income stream and caps your upside in one go! It’s especially dangerous advice to follow in a downturn like the 2022 mess.

Let’s say, for example, you own $200,000 worth of Cisco Systems (CSCO) shares. Cisco is one of the most reliable dividend payers in the tech space, hiking its payout for years and continuously growing it (though not spectacularly: Cisco’s annual hikes usually only come in at just one or two cents a share).… Read more

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Bitcoin, China and Fast 73% Dividend Stock Returns

Will China buy Bitcoin? If I were President Xi Jinping, looking across the Taiwan Strait, I would. Why wouldn’t he want to diversify his $1 trillion pile of Treasuries?

But there’s one thing that Xi—or any autocrat, for that matter—needs more than coins: Real assets with cash flow.

We’ll talk dividend trades that will benefit from these global trends in a moment. First, let’s start with crypto, because (indulge me, please) I need to get caught up on these questions. I’ve been saving a note from Joseph B., who asks what recommendations we have on cryptocurrencies.

Fellow reader Ted F. also asks about crypto, but from the Federal Reserve’s perspective.… Read more

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My Top Dividend Strategy Delivered a 161% Return (Here’s How It Works)

Beware of Wall Street “wisdom” now more than ever. Especially when it comes to the most commonly quoted maxim for retirement: it’s based on a rule that was never designed for times like these!

I’m talking about the so-called “4% rule,” which says you should sell 4% of your nest egg every year in retirement.

Sounds simple, right?

Trouble is, it slashes your income stream and caps your upside in one go! It’s especially dangerous advice to follow in a downturn like the one that’s hit us in the last few months.

Let’s say, for example, you own $200,000 worth of Cisco Systems (CSCO) shares.… Read more

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How to DRIP Your Way to 11.8% Dividends, 84% Profits

If this mess of a market has taught us anything (and it’s fair to say it’s taught us many things!), it’s the value of dividend reinvestment plans (DRIPs).

DRIPs are always a popular topic here at Contrarian Outlook—they’re a smart “set it and forget it” way for us to plow the payouts we don’t need back into our favorite dividend-paying stocks.

Markets Crackups Make DRIPs Profitable

At their core, DRIPs essentially take dollar-cost averaging (which you likely used to build your portfolio) and apply it to our dividends. By reinvesting a fixed amount of dividend cash at specific times (i.e.,… Read more

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We’re Up 149% in 2 Years—Now What?

We contrarians make our money by buying when things look bleak. We did that, and we’re up 149% on this excellent energy dividend.

But our strategy has suddenly become popular. Heck, I saw a front-page piece on Bloomberg.com outlining our “Crash ‘n Rally” energy strategy!

So, what do we do now?

We’ll talk about next steps for energy dividends in a moment. First, let’s recap how we got here so that we can decide if we want to order another quadruple-shot of Texas tea or step aside of the mainstream herd.

In April 2020, crude oil prices crashed. They actually hit negative territory, which means producers were paying people to take the goo off their hands.… Read more

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Barron’s Finally Comes Around to Our View on Energy Dividends

Nice to see our friends over at Barron’s finally catching up to us on the big dividends sitting right under our noses in oil and gas!

It’s almost like the magazine’s writers are sharing a subscription to our Contrarian Income Report service, because the six stocks they cited in an article they ran last week are almost all picks in our portfolio—specifically our “crash ‘n rally” energy bucket.

(It’s not the first time’s Barron’s has shadowed us. In April, they put out a strategy for retiring on dividends, a subject we literally wrote the book on two years ago.)… Read more

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These Inflation Dividend Stocks Could Rally Another 100%

Oil stocks—and their fat dividends—are breaking out to new highs.

Question for you. If Fed Chair Jay Powell hadn’t printed a bunch of money over the past 14 months, would energy stocks still be this electric?

Chairman JP Prints Lots of Money

My take? No way. Their recovery would be (much) more muted.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA)—the best and most unbiased source of industry information I know—world oil demand is projected to hit 96.7 million barrels per day this year.

Meanwhile, global supply is just 93.6 million barrels per day. Production was halted when the world shut down a spring ago.… Read more

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