Contrarian Outlook

Are higher interest rates and lower bond prices a sure thing for 2025? Mainstream financial pundits say yes. Which gives us thoughtful contrarians pause. Their narrative against bonds is assumed....

We’re now well on our way to Trump 2.0, and I’m getting a lot of questions from readers about where things head from here. I see the new administration as overall bullish for stocks. But the truth...

This has been a great year for stocks—and a great year for our 8%+ yielding closed-end funds (CEFs), too. That makes sense: Many CEFs invest in stocks, and many more hold bonds issued by publicly...

Small-cap stocks should benefit from the new administration. We’ll discuss four under $20 with yields between 7% and 15.1%. The Trump 2.0 Trade is rolling and small caps are soaring because they are...

I know that plenty of our readers are self-directed investors who love nothing more than to build—and run—their own portfolios. Digging into a fund’s prospectus and annual reports is something they...

It’s a tradition unlike any other! Move over, Masters. In these contrarian pages we select one dividend stock (or fund) for the year ahead. Last year we bet on a “safe, somewhat-secret” 7.4% dividend...

Most people think inflation will rise in a second Trump term—we can see it in the jump in 10-year Treasury rates over the last few weeks. But that trade is getting just a little bit crowded—and we...

If you’ve been investing for a while, you’ve probably thought about private equity more than once. Adding exposure to “PE” firms, which buy and sell privately held businesses, is a great way to...

Today we’ll discuss a 5.4% dividend that actually annualizes to 7%. A 5.7% payer that really dishes 12.4%. And even a headline 15% yield that is understated because the company handed out 16.1% last...

Hedge fund veteran and Wall Street-approved suit Scott Bessent is likely the new Treasury secretary. That’s why this 11% dividend is a big winner. Bessent will advocate for financial deregulation and...

We are drowning in post-election stock-market predictions, so let me go ahead and throw another one on the pile: This new administration will hurt the returns of folks who simply buy an index fund...

CEFs are renowned (by the few people who know about these high-income funds, of course!) for their outsized dividends—around 8%, on average, across the board as I write this. But buying a CEF is not...

It’s hard to find a hater right now. Wall Street fanboys analysts have Buy ratings on more than 75% of the S&P 500 at the moment. Give us the Sells. That’s right. We contrarians are not afraid to...

Well, that was fast. As you no doubt know by now, stocks gave back their post-election bump nearly as fast as they took it. Now they’re more or less where they started pre-election. There’s a story...

Six summers ago, Donald Trump lamented privately to Republican donors that he expected Jay Powell to be a “cheap money” Fed chair. To the President’s chagrin, Powell had recently raised interest...

Trump’s win cements what we’ve been saying for months: You can forget about a hard landing or a soft landing—This economy is headed for no landing at all. In the last few weeks, I’ve started to see...