There’s a big disconnect between the headlines and vanilla investors’ mood these days.

The headlines? Dark. Investors? Greedy.

Source: CNN

The CNN Fear & Greed Index has its flaws, but on the whole is a decent indicator of where investors’ heads are. As we can see here, despite the Iran conflict, they’re giddy.

At times like these, it pays for us contrarians to be cautious.

For us closed-end fund (CEF) investors, however, this isn’t a big concern. The funds in our CEF Insider portfolio (21 in all, with an average current yield of 7.9%) are run by pros we can count on to navigate overly exuberant times like this.… Read more

We’ve been dividend-hungry lately. Our Wednesday missives have brought 11 great income ideas in recent months!

It’s a busy week for our brood! If you bought these payers, you have three ex-dividend dates (the dates when the stock trades at a price minus—“ex”—the dividend per share) on deck this week. Plus a nice pay day!

Income Calendar for This Week

This neat weekly view comes to us courtesy of Income Calendar, our homegrown dividend tracker. We developed IC for serious income investors like yourself. The tool projects every dividend payment with accuracy that is unmatched in the industry.

This calendar beats today’s best AI—it’s custom-made and precision-tuned for dividend stocks.… Read more

Visa (V) is truly the Rocky Balboa of dividend stocks.

I know. I’m dating myself with that reference. But I can’t help it: Every time Visa takes a beating—and the mainstream crowd counts it out—it comes roaring back.

Take a look at this long-term chart. Every single dip was a buying opportunity—including this latest one:

Visa Gets Clobbered and Gets Back Up. Every Time

Its latest bounce—a 9% roll higher (see the right side of the chart above) during trading on April 29—came just last week, when the company reported earnings. But despite that rise, we haven’t missed our shot here.… Read more

This has got to be the most “hidden” (maybe hated?) stock-market run I’ve ever seen.

The headlines are all doom and gloom (I think you’ll agree), but behind it all, the stock market is on a roll—returning 31% in just the last year. That’s more than triple the market’s long-term average yearly return of around 10%.

Where does that leave those of us who look to stocks for growth and income? Is there more runway ahead, or is it too late to buy in?

In my opinion, this 31% gain is setting the table for more, and we’ll get into exactly why in a moment.… Read more

Preferred stocks are a little-known dividend secret. Worth knowing, by the way—they can yield up to 9.9%!

These “forgotten cousins” of common stocks can make a dividend portfolio. Plus, the discounts! Today we can buy a basket with some ingredients fetching as little as 89 cents on the dollar.

A quick refresher on preferreds. When a company needs capital, it typically either sells common stock—the AAPL to our Apple, the JPM to our JPMorgan—or bonds. But there is a third option, and plenty of companies use it: preferred stock.

Like common stock, preferreds give you a sliver of ownership in a company, they can improve in price based on the company’s performance, and they pay dividends.… Read more

The time has come to make a move on this software-stock selloff. And we’re going to use our favorite income plays—closed-end funds (CEFs)—to do it.

That’s because the story here—that AI is going to harm the sector, cost jobs and hurt the economy as a whole—is the opposite of what’s really happening on the ground. And we’ve finally got some reliable data to prove it.

A CEF that’s well-positioned to tap this disconnect is a 7.8%-payer called the BlackRock Science and Technology Term Trust (BSTZ).

It’s a name we’ve long held in our CEF Insider portfolio, and it’s in a “sweet spot” here.… Read more

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