3 Bond Funds Yielding up to 11.6%: Bargains … Or Just Cheap?

Our Archive

Search completed

Buy bonds!” – Contrarian Outlook, 2H 2022

Two years later, the herd finally hopped on our fixed-income bandwagon…

“Buy bonds!” – Wall Street, 2H 2024

Yes, it is satisfying to be right. But it also makes me nervous that mainstream (“vanilla”) investors now agree with us.

If you bought with us, you are sitting pretty. On the other hand, if you are trying to put new money to work today, this is a challenging time. I don’t like buying high and I especially avoid purchasing popular names.

Case in point, my favorite PIMCO products in the closed-end fund (CEF) space.… Read more

Read More

These days, many of the dividend investors I talk to feel squeezed between:

  1. Weak yields (which have plunged as stocks have surged) and
  2. High taxes (which are likely to rise further).

You’re no doubt feeling this pinch, too. The good news is that there’s an investment that lets you wiggle out of this trap, regularly offering steady-as-she-goes dividends up to 5%.

There’s another nice twist that works in your favor here, because these payouts are tax-free, so they could be worth a lot more to you—I’m talking payouts north of 7.5% with tax savings factored in, depending on your tax bracket.… Read more

Read More

Still feeling the taxman’s sting from April? Then you probably need to consider getting some tax-free income.

Having an income stream the IRS can’t touch may sound like pie in the sky, but it’s a reality if you hold municipal bonds. That’s because the tax code provides an exclusion for these bonds, allowing most US investors to collect interest payments from them tax-free. And in many states, income from those bonds is exempt from state taxes, as well.

If you aren’t intrigued yet, then let me show you some numbers—and what they could mean to your portfolio.

If you’re in the highest tax bracket (37%) and you get a 6%-yielding municipal-bond fund, that income is the exact same as a 9.5% dividend from stocks.…
Read more

Read More

Municipal bonds are off to a slow start in 2018 – which is usually a bullish sign for these tax-free payers.

We last “pounded the table” on munis in December 2016. They were coming off their worst month since the Great Recession, and we discussed their tendency to rally when they are hated:

“It’s impossible to call a top in yields (or bottom in munis) without the benefit of hindsight. But we contrarians make our money buying when nobody else wants to – and the last time munis were this hated, they returned 30-38% over the next 12 months.”

Turns out that was the bottom in munis.…
Read more

Read More

Categories