There’s one income-producing sector you probably hold in your portfolio—and you may be wondering why it’s crashing out this year.

I’m talking about utilities, which are famous for their rock-steady dividends (and predictable dividend hikes). These companies literally power the economy. But if utilities are so important, why are they in the toilet while the rest of the market is on fire?

Investors Loathe Utilities

Before we go further, if you’ve noticed your portfolio’s utility sleeve taking a dive like the one above—or bigger—don’t worry. This dip is a buying opportunity! I’ll give you one option paying a fat 8.7% dividend below.

First, the big driver behind utilities’ plunge is the recovery in energy prices. Oil and natural gas are soaring after 2017’s bear market and the cold snap that kick-started this year’s commodity consumption. Higher energy costs hurt utilities’ profits, which, in turn, lowers their stock prices.

The Upside of Down

But if you’re an income seeker, this crash is an excellent opportunity to bulk up your income stream. Consider the Utilities Sector SPDR ETF (XLU), which is now yielding 3.5%, its highest level in over a year:

Utilities’ Income Rises

Let’s put some numbers behind this to understand what’s going on.

If you put $500,000 into XLU at the start of 2018, you would have gotten a $16,500 annual cash payout from the fund’s then-decent 3.3% dividend. But if you buy XLU today, you’ll get $17,350—a 5.2% raise! And that’s just because of a 0.2% increase in yield.

That is the power of dividends. And now I’m going to show you how we can kick that payout into overdrive.

Double Your Income in One Buy

There are a lot of funds out there paying a 6% dividend yield, or higher, while still investing in those same utilities XLU does. They’re called closed-end funds (if you’re not familiar with CEFs, click here for a quick and easy-to-follow primer), and they operate in an important way that supercharges their income stream.

The secret? Discounts.

When you buy $1 in XLU shares, you get $1 of XLU’s portfolio. That’s pretty straightforward. But CEFs are different: they often trade at a discount to their portfolio’s net asset value (NAV, or the market value of their holdings). And that makes their dividend yield even higher.

For instance, the Duff & Phelps Global Utility Trust (DPG) trades at an 11.5% discount to NAV—or its “true” value—which helps it cover a nice 8.7% dividend to shareholders.

Now let’s put some numbers behind this to see what we’re talking about. That $500,000 investment in XLU that paid $16,500 in annual cash dividends? Put it in DPG and suddenly you’re getting $43,450 a year. That’s a 163% raise!

Think there’s a catch? Let me put your mind at ease.

One of the first things investors do when they hear about a CEF is track its performance history. Do this with DPG, and things look bad. Let’s compare the price charts of DPG and XLU over the last year:

The Seeming Laggard

XLU is up nearly 4% while DPG is flat—a sucker’s bet, right?

Wrong.

The mistake most folks make is to look just at the price return of a fund and not the total return, including dividends. That’s because the media has trained us to obsess over the S&P 500, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Nasdaq 100—indexes that pay paltry dividends (you’ll get 2% on the S&P if you’re lucky). Paltry dividends don’t add much to total returns, which are the value of the dividend payouts and the price changes.

But CEFs typically yield 6% or more, so their dividends are a much more important component of their total returns. So now let’s look at a total return chart of DPG and XLU, including the dividends both funds paid out:

Laggard No More!

All of a sudden, DPG doesn’t look like a sucker’s bet anymore.

It’s a chronic problem with markets—a lot of investors do the most basic amount of research and give up. What exactly are they giving up? In this case, a 163% higher dividend, along with superior returns. If that isn’t a good enough reason to do deeper research, I don’t know what is.

So should you buy DPG now?

If you’re looking for a big income stream and you’re in it for the long haul, DPG is a good option. There are others, though. Some utility CEFs have bigger yields, and some have much better long-term returns than DPG. A basket of these funds, bought when their discounts are most attractive and their portfolios best positioned to guarantee their dividends, is ideal for most investors.

But, of course, as you’re shopping around for the right CEF, do make sure you look at total returns.

4 Better Buys Than DPG (Incredible Cash Payouts Up to 10.4%)

And I haven’t gotten to your best option yet: let me do the legwork for you.

In fact, I’ve already done it! And today I’m pounding the table on 4 bargain CEFs that hand you an average yield of 8.1% and even bigger upside (I’m talking gains of 20%+ here) than you’ll get from DPG in 2018.

One of these little-known picks hands you an astounding 10.0% payout and I expect it to be one of my biggest gainers in 2018, thanks to its massive discount to NAV. Just imagine banking an income stream like that while you watch your nest egg streak higher.

Editor's Note: The stock market is way up – and that’s terrible news for us dividend investors. Yields haven’t been this low in decades! But there are still plenty of great opportunities to secure meaningful income if you know where to look. Brett Owens' latest report reveals how you can easily (and safely) rake in 8%+ dividends and never worry about drawing down your capital again. Click here for full details!

Source: Contrarian Outlook 

The S&P 500 has already increased in value by over $1 trillion in 2018—and January isn’t even over yet!

What’s behind this incredible bull market isn’t euphoria or hysteria—it’s actually sound investing principles. As I wrote in a January 18 article, the bull market is being driven by the best possible trend: higher earnings and sales for America’s best companies, which is itself the result of improving economic conditions for everyday Americans.

Parties ultimately end, of course. And this one is no different—the bull market is being driven by a solid and reasonable belief that American companies will go up in value. But eventually that sound line of thinking will turn into a euphoria that creates a bubble—then a crash.

Fortunately, we aren’t there yet, and we probably won’t be for a couple years or so. Unfortunately, though, we are seeing some foolish investing decisions being made as a result of naive first-level thinking.

Today I’m going to show you 2 common mistakes—and 2 investments—that have captured the herd’s attention for all the wrong reasons. Read on to learn more about them, and how you can steer clear.

Mistake #1: Buying on Dividend Yield Alone

The Eagle Point Credit Company (ECC) pays an outsized 13% dividend yield as I write this and makes a simple claim: that its financial professionals know how to make money from obscure and complicated investments.

But that’s not the whole story.

It’s true that ECC is one of the biggest investors in collateralized loan obligations (CLOs), and it’s true that CLOs are very complicated. You can think of CLOs as derivatives that are a lot like the mortgage-backed securities that were at the heart of the financial crisis; ECC claims to understand these assets and can make a profit accordingly.

The real problem, though, is ECC’s sky-high fees.

Last quarter, ECC reported a 10.7% expense ratio. In other words, for every $1.00 in assets the company has, it takes out 10.7 cents per year in fees. ECC needs to make a 10.7% profit on its investments just to pay its managers—before shareholders get a penny!

Of course, before many folks even get to the fees, they see the juicy dividend yield I mentioned earlier, which has ranged to nearly 15% so far this year, and hit the buy button.

Juicy Income—At First Glance

Trouble is, that sky-high yield is because the stock’s price keeps falling.

ECC Not a Grower

Notice the huge drop in price over the last week? That’s because ECC issued new shares, diluting current investors’ ownership. Why would ECC do such a thing? They may want to release more shares to make more aggressive bets in the CLO market. It’s also true that more shares translates into more assets to manage, generating more fees for ECC.

This is definitely an investment to avoid.

Mistake #2: Ignoring History

It’s true that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme, and in financial markets, rhymes on historical events are sometimes all the signal you need to stay away.

This is the case with Prospect Capital Corporation (PSEC).

I haven’t talked about this stock in over a year, because it was pretty clear that Prospect’s past mistakes were recurring, and that meant we would see the same chain of events as in yesteryear.

And that’s what 2017 delivered.

Let’s back up. PSEC is a business development company (BDC) that’s structured to give most of its income to shareholders. That’s why PSEC yields over 10% right now.

There are just a couple problems.

For one, the BDC world is getting extremely crowded. BDCs are a good idea—they pool together a lot of money from investors and then lend that money out to small and medium-sized businesses that can’t get loans easily from banks.

But BDCs are such a good idea that a lot of new ones have opened up in the last few years. It’s an easy way to make money if you have connections and access to capital, so the barrier to entry is low. That crowdedness has also resulted in profit margins shrinking for BDCs, in turn lowering the income most BDC shareholders have access to.

Meantime, the extremely illiquid portfolios that BDCs hold are nearly impossible to sell in a market panic, which further boosts their risk.

Those two reasons alone are good motivation to stay away. But many investors ignored them in the first couple months of 2017, which is why PSEC did this:

A Crowded Trade

If you were playing PSEC for the short term, this was great. Most PSEC holders aren’t, though—they buy for that 10%+ dividend and hold forever. Which is why PSEC shareholders aren’t happy now, as you can see from this chart:

A Steep Drop

Not only has PSEC’s price crashed since its big early 2017 run-up, but its dividend has been slashed by 28%, as well. Note that the majority of the price crash happened before the dividend cut. The market isn’t clairvoyant—but a lot of investors who looked closely at PSEC saw that its dividend coverage ratio had fallen below 100%, and it could no longer afford to pay its high payout to shareholders.

This wasn’t a shock; Prospect had the same problem in 2015. And it will have this problem again and again and again … causing the stock to keep crashing and the income stream to keep shrinking.

2 Takeaways to Protect and Grow Your Nest Egg

What can we learn from these 2 examples?

First, be suspicious of high dividends. While 7% or 8% yields can be sustainable in many cases, it’s very rare (but not impossible, as I’ll show you in a moment) for a 10% yield to be sustainable. The higher the yield, the more need for a careful analysis of how sustainable that dividend really is.

Second, we need to pay attention to history. Investors who took the time to look just a couple years back into Prospect Capital’s past knew to stay away.

The third, and perhaps most important, lesson relates to complexity. Some financial advisors urge clients to avoid investing in anything they don’t understand. This is silly. None of us really understand what goes into our iPhones, but that hasn’t stopped Apple (AAPL) from soaring.

Companies that produce financial products are no different. They provide a value and a service, and investors can profit from them even if they don’t understand the technicalities.

However, we must be able to identify and quantify the value a company provides, and how that value is changing. The real problem with ECC isn’t that its business is too complicated—it’s that ECC’s management earns too much money by charging shareholders for their services.

The bottom line? Find companies and funds that have management teams whose interests align with yours, a history of making the right decisions and a structure that rewards shareholders more than managers. When you do, you’ll find that massive profits come your way.

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Source: Contrarian Outlook 

Investors in high yield InfraCap MLP ETF (NYSE: AMZA) were shocked to get the news of a 36% dividend reduction. Fortunately, there is no reason to panic, and there are some good lessons to be learned from the past and future history of AMZA.

AMZA is an actively managed exchange traded fund that owns a portfolio of publicly traded master limited partnerships (MLPs). The MLP sector is known for high current yields. The AMZA management boosted the fund’s income with call options selling. A $0.52 per share quarterly dividend had been paid since the start of 2016. With the fund’s shares trading between $7.00 and $11.50 over the last two years, the result was a yield in the high teens to mid 20% range.

On Friday, January 19, the fund management company announced the dividend would be switched to a monthly payment of $0.11 per share. This lowers the annual dividend amount to $1.32 from the previous $2.04. This was a prudent move by management to keep the dividend stable as the fund continues to go through significant growth pains. Instead of going deeper into the reasons for the dividend change, I want to cover some lessons learned.

Lesson 1: An ETF is not a stock. I received a lot of questions asking if the AMZA share price would drop due to the dividend cut. That typically happens with a company cuts its dividend. However, as an ETF, the AMZA share price is not determined by investor sentiment. The share price is a mathematical calculation of the value of the portfolio divided by the number of shares held by investors. AMZA moves up and down generally along with the overall MLP sector. It does not matter to the share price whether the dividend has been cut.

Related: The Safe Monthly Dividend Stock to Buy and Hold Forever

Lesson 2: Compound reinvestment of a high yield security is a very powerful wealth building strategy. If you look at theis price chart showing the Alerian MLP Index and AMZA over the last two years, it looks like it would be impossible to have gains in the MLP sector over the full period. MLPs went through a steep correction to start 2016 and then a bear market that lasted most of 2017.

Yet, if you took those big dividends from AMZA and bought more shares, you would now be well ahead. Here is the math. One thousand shares purchased at the start of 2016 cost $11,200. If the dividends were reinvested at a price near the ex-dividend date price each quarter, the quarterly dividend payments would have grown from $520 paid in January 2016 to $777.92 earned in January 2018. Total dividend earnings were $5,763. Reinvesting those dividends resulted in a current total share count of 1,587. At the current share price of $8.88, those shares are worth $14,093. Through an ugly stretch for MLPs, the investment grew by 26%. At the new, lower dividend rate, the current number of shares will generate about $175 in monthly income, an 18% yield on the original investment amount.

The next step is to get a sustained uptrend from MLPs, and it looks like one started in November 2017.

Lesson 3: If you are an income investor, don’t focus on the share values in your brokerage account. Keep track of your dividend income, reinvest some or all that income and over time your income stream and account value will grow. It’s powerful math that is not obvious when you look at share prices and price charts.

AMZA has entered a new phase in its life, and I am excited to see where it goes from here. The yield is still a high 15% and the MLP sector fundamentals are the strongest they have been since 2014.