Contrarian Outlook

I get plenty of questions about specific closed-end funds from members of my CEF Insider service, which focuses on quick-moving smaller CEFs (here I mean those with sub-$1-billion market caps).We love...

Healthcare—along with consumer staples (“buying stuff”) and utilities (“keeping the lights on”)—provide portfolio stability. Plus, they usually pay dividends,...

Far too many investors think inflation is bad news for closed-end funds (CEFs), for a simple reason: they fear it’ll boost CEFs’ borrowing costs. (Because CEFs, of course, use leverage to...

I recently accomplished something that had been on my “to do” list for no fewer than three months. I figured out how to log into my 401(K)! You would think a simple “password...

Oil stocks—and their fat dividends—are breaking out to new highs.Question for you. If Fed Chair Jay Powell hadn’t printed a bunch of money over the past 14 months, would energy...

Are the best things in life actually free? It depends how we handle the hidden costs.Free coffee is good. At home, I drink one mega-cup per day. At fixed income conferences, I typically scale that...

With stocks grinding along near all-time highs, decent discounts (and decent dividend yields!) are thin on the ground. But if we look close enough, they are there.The answer to this no-yield problem...

The once unthinkable has happened: AT&T (NYSE:T), a Dividend Aristocrat that increased payouts for 30 years, said it will cut its payout nearly in half.The move is especially infuriating because,...

Energy prices have rallied furiously, but they likely have further to go. Oil and gas prices last peaked around 2014 and sunk slowly until the black goo hit negative prices in the spring of last...

There’s a new closed-end fund (CEF) on the market, and it comes from one of the biggest CEF issuers in the space: BlackRock (NYSE:BLK).It’s big—with $4.5 billion in assets under...

No doubt, there is a lot to be worried about right now in the financial world. Fortunately, there is finally a lot of worrying happening.We contrarians welcome unease. Broader discomfort means...

“I have no clue what to do,” said a friend recently over backyard beers. “On the one hand, stocks are still rising. On the other, everything is pricey.”I know you’re...

Manufacturing is as cyclical a business as there is, and it’s about to take off, driven by two vastly misunderstood factors:An uptick in inflation, and A big jump in stimulus spending What most...

The Fed has crushed many retirements because bonds simply don’t yield enough. Heck, neither do most stocks thanks to the equity bubble they’ve inflated!But we dividend-focused retirees...

Plenty of people blindly buy into the line that market volatility is a bad thing.It’s easy to see why, after last year’s crash dented retirement savings around the world. Contrarians like...

Let’s be honest: there are a ton of ways to collect passive income out there. But there’s only one that’s easy to get into (no matter how much money you have!), generates yearly cash...