I was in heaven. One baseball toss away was a man of surreal size, Aaron Judge.

The New York Yankee slugger. All six-foot-seven standing in a minor league ballpark right here in Sacramento’s Sutter Health Park.

My family and I sat second row, right behind the dugout. I’d waited until just four hours before first pitch to buy the tickets. (A contrarian purchasing strategy that usually works because most buyers don’t have the stomach for it. Here once again it paid off with reasonably priced dugout seats to watch the Yanks at a fraction of the price we’d have paid in the Bronx.)… Read more

Few people realize it, but there’s a way to take a “low” dividend yield and “convert” it to a payout four times higher. Maybe even more.

The stocks we need to get this “hidden” payout are hiding in plain sight.  To find them, we need to be on the lookout for three key strengths:

• A growing, and ideally accelerating, dividend.
• A history of share buybacks, and …
• A high “shareholder yield,” which combines the first two points (I’ll come back to that in a second).

Even better if we can find a stock whose share price has fallen behind dividend growth.… Read more

Hands down, one of the biggest retirement risks I’ve come across is when investors try to play it safe.

That’s because, in hiding out from volatility, they stunt their returns and end up locked into the workforce for years longer than they need to be.

Worst thing is, many of these “safe” options sport high yields that never deliver in reality. Consider a savings account:

Source: Forbes Advisor

To be sure, the highest rates can look appealing, like the 5.8% here. But in reality, larger balances earn closer to 3.9%.

You can do a little better with a 30-year Treasury, which yields around 4.9% now.… Read more

Consumer staples are boring and reliable. And they typically pay generous dividends.

But generous has nothing on these fantastic yields from 5.2% to 11.3%!

Historically, staples have held up better than the broader market during downturns. Lately, however, that hasn’t happened:

Consumer Staples: A Rare Failure to Protect

Uncertainty fueled a staples rally across the first couple months of the year. But when the war in Iran triggered a near-correction in the S&P 500, the sector didn’t just take the same elevator down—they found a faster one.

The rub? The war sent inflation expectations through the roof. Defensive though staples might be, when consumers really start pinching pennies, they shift away from the pricey brand names that anchor this sector and into private-label products from smaller public and even private companies.… Read more

The year isn’t even four months old, and we’ve already been hit with three events that would normally send markets tumbling:

• The Iran conflict.
• The hit to software stocks, after AI raised concerns about their business model.
• The private-credit collapse.

We’re going to zero in on that third point today, because while the Iran situation is an ongoing tragedy, it will be resolved at some point. When it does, the relief rally will likely be significant.

The software story is similar. Over time, I see these stocks as winners in the AI race, not victims.

But the private-credit tale is different, because what it’s actually telling us about the economy—that it’s stable and growing—is the exact opposite of what most people think it’s saying.… Read more

Monthly dividends and panic readings? Now that’s a path to profits.

Two weeks ago, my Contrarian Income Report readers and I were staring at a recent decline in DoubleLine Yield Opportunities Fund (DLY). Buy more, hold or sell? DLY owners were understandably jumpy. Something must be wrong with the bond portfolio itself, right? Why else would it be down?

The bond fund had just registered its deepest panic reading—which I will share with you in a moment—since we’ve owned it. My contrarian gut said buy. Always buy the hysteria. But, I admit, my taste isn’t for everyone.

(“Dad, why are you buying sardines with tomato sauce?”… Read more

I just took a glance at the Fed futures market and, frankly, couldn’t believe what I saw.

These traders don’t see a rate cut from the Fed until July of 2027. And even then, only a bare majority do:

Source: CME Group

C’mon man! That’s 15 months from now.

I know predictions are tough, but from where I sit, this one seems awfully hard to justify.

For one, Trump administration pick Kevin Warsh is likely to be installed as Fed chair long before then, with Jay Powell’s term officially up next month. Sure, Warsh has been hawkish in the past, but over the last few months, he’s been in line with the administration’s wish for lower borrowing costs.… Read more

Wall Street and the press have it all wrong on the US economy. Here’s the truth:

It’s stable—and growing.

I know. Boring, right? Maybe to most people. But not to us!

The narrative put forth by the press and punditry—that inequality is rampant and getting worse—lends itself to much more compelling headlines (which is why we’re not hearing much about it).

Worries around this inequality—namely that it will cause more political instability and pile risk on to the economy as a whole—are part of what’s been weighing on stocks lately. That and concerns about the Iran War, the direction of interest rates, unpredictable trade policy and others (it’s a long list!).… Read more

In three charts, we’ll show why monthly dividends are superior to even blue-chip payers. Plus, we’ll discuss five monthlies that yield between 9.7% and 13.5%.

First, let’s talk about monthly dividend timing. Check out what our monthly cash flow looks like if we invest in five of the market’s largest dividend-paying companies. These are five of the S&P 500’s biggest holdings, and we can find them in just about every major large-cap fund:

Source: Income Calendar

The good news? Every three months, we cash a dividend check.

The bad news? That harvest is followed by two months of crickets.

Let’s compare that dividend calendar with the projections for my five-pack of monthly payers.… Read more

AI is making real money—I’m talking about $30 billion in revenue for just one leading AI firm.

On April 6, this company, Anthropic, maker of the Claude chatbot, reported annualized revenue of $30 billion.

That’s a stunning figure, and we’re going to benefit from it—and collect an 8.3% dividend while we do. Our vehicle? One of our favorite tech-focused closed-end funds (CEFs).

What’s more, this fund is a bargain, trading at an 11% discount to net asset value (NAV, or the value of its underlying portfolio) as I write this.

Let’s back up a sec.

That $30-billion figure is surprising enough, but the growth rate is equally stunning: up more than 200% from just last year:

Source: CEF Insider

Put another way, Anthropic has calculated annualized revenue on par with the total revenue posted by Clorox (CLX), Ralph Lauren (RL), Church & Dwight (CHD), Domino’s Pizza (DPZ) and Hasbro (HAS) combined.… Read more