These 7% Dividends Crushed The Market

Published 07/09/2019, 06:23 AM
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Today I’m going to give you everything you need to sail through the next crash, crush the S&P 500 by this time next year—and grab safe dividends up to 8.4%.

We’ll pull off this “dividend hat trick” through a set of “pullback-proof” investments with dividends up to 5 times bigger than what your typical S&P 500 stock pays.

In a moment, I’ll reveal three funds yielding up to 8.4% that are more than worthy of your attention now. They come from a corner of the market that will surprise you.

First, though, you might be wondering how I found these big, steady payouts.

The answer is that these three funds have a lot in common with the seven “best buys” I released one year ago, in the June 2018 issue of my members-only Contrarian Income Report service.

And how did those seven do?

Just fine! They yielded an outsized 7.2%, on average (with the biggest yielder of the bunch paying 8.2%), when I pounded the table on them a year back.

There’s more, though.

Because these “magnificent seven” went on to do something income plays simply aren’t supposed to do: crush the S&P 500!

Since I recommended these seven stocks to CIR members a year ago, they’ve returned 14%, on average, including dividends, clobbering the index’s 11%. And these stocks’ big payouts mean CIR members got a big slice of that return in cash!

And remember, that 14% was just the average. Check out some of the amazing performances the top names put up:

Highest Yielders Dominate
Highest Yielders

To be clear, these three stocks—Blackstone (NYSE:BX) Mortgage Trust (BXMT), in blue, Medical Properties Trust (MPW), in red, and Ladder Capital (LADR), in orange, led the way, while boasting the highest yields of our seven picks, at 7.9%, 7.6%, and 8.2%, respectively.

So much for the so-called “wisdom” that you can have income or gains—but not both! And these seven picks’ outperformance isn’t even the best part.

This is: when the market fell off a cliff last September and stayed on its back till the end of the year, not a single one of these seven stocks fell as far as the S&P 500. One, Medical Properties Trust, even knocked out a double-digit return!

A Classic “Pullback-Proof” Play in Action
S&P 500 ETF Total Return Price % Change

In other words, all our CIR members had to do was sit back, pocket their 7.2% average dividends and wait for the 2019 rebound!

Where I’m Investing Now—for Safe Payouts Up to 8.4%

But enough with history.

Let’s look to the future and one corner of the market where we’ll find the next big dividends (and upside) heading into the back half of 2019. I’ll also give you those three high-yield funds (with payouts up to 8.4%) I mentioned earlier.

Then, at the end of this article, I’ll give you a chance to get the latest issue of Contrarian Income Report, just released last Friday, with my next seven portfolio “best buys.” They come from across the investing universe—foreign stocks and bonds, US REITs and undervalued infrastructure plays, to name a few.

I fully expect these fresh seven picks to crush the market and protect your nest egg in the next 12 months—just like our previous septet did in the last 12!

America: A Dividend Desert

Before we get to that, though, we need to face facts: with the S&P 500 up 20% in the first six months of 2019, many of the big dividends have dried up here in America.

As I write, the typical S&P 500 stock yields 1.8%. Ten-year Treasuries are little better, paying less than 2% (and falling!).

Rate-Cut Talk Tanks Treasury Yields
10 Year Treasury Rate

And now the Fed is set to throw gas on the fire, with the market pricing in three to four rate cuts in the next nine months, starting with the Fed’s July 31 meeting:

Target Rate Probabilities

As I wrote last week, in the rare instances when the Fed cuts rates in a rising market (like today), the result is usually higher stock prices.

So where the heck are we supposed to find bargain high yielders now?

We’ll dive into one area most income players have left untouched: emerging markets. But we’re not going to buy overseas stocks—we’re going to turn to safe, underappreciated EM bonds instead.

The CEF Advantage

No, I have no interest in hopping on a plane to scout out issues from Brazil, Indonesia or other foreign locales. Why would you when, with a click of a mouse, you can hire a top-notch fixed-income manager who will handpick an emerging-market bond portfolio for you?

That’s one advantage of tapping EM bonds through high-yielding closed-end funds (CEFs). Here’s another: unlike ETFs, CEFs can’t issue shares to new investors after their IPOs. But like ETFs, CEFs trade on the open market, like stocks.

The upshot? Occasionally a fund will fall out of favor and trade at a discount to the value of its underlying portfolio, known as the net asset value, or NAV.

Our job: buy when these markdowns get absurdly wide, then “ride them up” as they revert back to normal, yanking the share price higher as they do.

With that, here are three emerging-market CEFs I like now. Their yields all trounce the payouts on the S&P 500 and the 10-year, and their portfolios have all returned at least 7% annualized since inception.

Best of all, they set us up for further upside—and downside protection—thanks to their outsized discounts to NAV:

3 “Globetrotting” CEF Bargains Paying Up to 8.4%
3 “Globetrotting” CEF Bargains Paying Up To 8.4%

In case you’re wondering how these three funds can sustain dividends up to 8.4%, let me clear that up, because it comes back to the discount to NAV I just mentioned.

The yields shown above are based on the CEF’s market price. But that doesn’t matter to management: they only care about the “yield on NAV” (or the yearly payout as a percentage of the per-share value of the fund’s portfolio). That’s what dictates how much they need to earn from their bond holdings to cover the fund’s dividend.

And when you calculate the yield on NAV, you see that these payouts are safe, with TEI’s yield on NAV coming in at 7.3% (vs. 8.5% on market price), EMD at 7.4% (vs. 8.4%) and EHI at 6.9% (vs. 7.6%).

For pros like the ones running these rock-solid income plays, fetching annualized returns like those is a snap. They’ve already proven it with their 7%+ annualized returns on NAV!

Disclosure: Brett Owens and Michael Foster are contrarian income investors who look for undervalued stocks/funds across the U.S. markets. Click here to learn how to profit from their strategies in the latest report, "7 Great Dividend Growth Stocks for a Secure Retirement."

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