How to Bank $7,050 in Cash Payouts in 4 Weeks

I was not supposed to be sharing my favorite income strategy (for weekly payouts) with you today. But I convinced my publisher to make an exception – so please take advantage of his rare act of leniency and read this carefully today.

As you probably know I’m the rare “income guy” who thinks that these “elevated” Treasury yields are still a joke. As I write, the 10-year IOU from Uncle Sam is rallying back towards 3%. Is anyone who is not already rich retiring off of these yields?

A 3% yield on a $1 million portfolio generates just $30,000 per year before taxes. A better idea is my now-famous “No Withdrawal” Portfolio, which currently pays a blended 7.7% yield. Put the same million bucks into it, and you’ll receive $77,000 per year in dividends – with potential gains upside to boot:

BUT – what if you don’t have $1 million? Or need more in income than $77,000 annually? That’s where my dividend accelerator comes in.

Don’t Reach for Dicey Dividends – Accelerate Secure Ones, Instead

Many income investors get desperate and reach for double-digit yields. Unfortunately most are dividend traps. (If these payouts were safe, the stocks or funds would already be in our No Withdrawal Portfolio!)

Let’s pick on Triangle Capital (TCAP), a business development company (BDC) that pays 10.2% today. On the surface, this looks great. Unfortunately for each dividend payment investors receive, they tend to lose more in price erosion:

TCAP: It’s a (Dividend) Trap!

Low yields on blue chip stocks make yield seekers thirsty enough to consider traps like TCAP. Fortunately, there’s a better way – and it’s as easy as buying or selling any blue chip stock.

Rather than “buying and hoping” that a modest paying stock will also go up in price, I prefer to accelerate its 1% or 2% yield into weekly payouts that annualize to 20%+. Here’s how.

Safer – and More Profitable – Than Buying Stocks Outright

When I mention stock options to “basic” investors, they tend to have one of two levels of experience:

  1. They stay away from options (perceiving them as a form of gambling), or
  2. They buy options (which is a form of gambling).

Few are aware of the third – vastly superior – option:

  1. Selling options to the gamblers, banking the premiums as weekly income.

Why is it better to be a seller than a buyer? The real question is when – it’s better to be a seller than a buyer when options are within 30 days of expiration.

We have a phenomenon called “option decay” to thank. Stock options, after all, have two dimensions:

  1. Their strike price – the level the stock needs to be for the option to pay, and
  2. Their expiration date – the time-based deadline for this to happen.

Put options are bets that a stock will decline in price. Call options are bets on a bullish move higher. Both “decay” in price as they get closer to expiration, and their prices decline faster and faster the closer we get. As a seller, I like to catch the last 30 days – which really tips the odds in my favor:

I also prefer selling put options on high quality dividend payers and growers. And, if you choose right (and I’ll show you how in a minute), you’ll be amazed with the level of payouts that you can generate with this safe strategy (I’m talking about 20%+ cash returns per year).

It’s safe because we only use it on stocks we’d be happy to own outright. Selling puts on the best blue chip dividend payers gives us a “heads we win, tails we win” outcome:

  1. If the put expires worthless (the most likely scenario), then we bank the put premium free and clear without ever having to buy the stock.
  2. If the stock declines below the put price, then we still keep our premium – and we get to purchase the stock at a discount.

Once you learn this strategy, you’ll probably never want to buy a stock outright again. After all, why would you want to pay the “list price” when you can lock in a discount – or simply use the strategy to accelerate pedestrian yields to 20% or higher!

Here’s an Example Using an Excellent Utility Stock

“First-level” thinking says that utility stocks sink as interest rates rise. Since these “bond proxies” are nothing more than pretty yields to many investors, their payout attractiveness wanes as competition from fixed income rolls in.

This may be true for stalwarts like Duke Energy (DUK) and Southern Company (SO), which are merely giving their investors token annual raises. Their dividends have climbed only 12% and 7% respectively over the last three years combined.

These stocks are indeed basically bond proxies.

But not all utilities should be sold in advance of rising rates. There’s a notable exception that leaves these tortoises (and their middling dividends) in the dust.

NextEra Energy (NEE) is the largest developer of renewable energy in North America. The firm has been a fast grower for decades. It’s increased its dividend for 23 straight years.

And these have been meaningful raises – NextEra has shown up its peers with 149% dividend growth over the last decade (versus just 26% for the utility sector’s widely marketed ETF):

Why NEE is the Best Utility to Buy

Thanks to the firm’s most recent payout raise, it now shovels out $1.11 per share per quarter (for 2.7% yearly). But we can accelerate this payout to 19.5% yearly.

That’s exactly what my Options Income Alert subscribers and I have done four times in the last fourteen months. My readers who sold 10 contracts per trade banked $7,050 in cash payouts without ever having to buy NEE!

$7,050 in Payouts in Just 4 Weeks

We turned NEE into our “personal dividend ATM.” We simply tapped it anytime I saw a setup that I liked – and then placed the put premiums directly on our pockets.

NEE’s Put Premiums: Weekly Payouts Averaging $1,762.50

And again, these trades were as simple as buying or selling any stock (or CEF). We simply sold put options on NEE instead of buying or selling the stock itself.

It was just a different click of the mouse. And if you’re interested in turning NEE into your personal ATM, then this click will net you $1,850 in two-and-a-half short weeks:

Click Here for $1,850 in Payouts

Can I give you a hand with the specifics? If so, I have some easy-to-follow instructions that you can get started with today.

Get up to 14 dividend paychecks per month from safe, reliable stocks with The Monthly Dividend Paycheck Calendar, an easy-to-use system that shows you which dividend stocks to pick, when to buy them, when you get paid your dividends, and how much.  All you have to do is buy the stocks you like and tell them where to send your dividend payments. For more information Click Here.

Is It Time to Bail on the FAANGs?

In recent months, it has gotten harder to separate the performance of the U.S. stock market from the performance of the FAANG stocks (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google/Alphabet).

Despite Facebook’s face-plant, after its earnings announcement led to the worst one-day loss ever for any stock, the overall performance of the market year-to-date has been supported by the FAANG group. While they’re only a 13.6% weight in the S&P 500’s market cap, they’re driving the market up to the tune of almost half of its year-to-date gains. Impressive stuff for just 5 stocks on their own. Here is a chart from Bespoke Investment Group that displays that fact graphically.

The question facing investors is, of course, whether the FAANG stocks will continue carrying the market or if their leadership is beginning to fade.

Tech Divergence

Investors have taken it as gospel that tech stocks promise unending growth, based on the over-arching macro-trend of a digital revolution across society. This makes them different from other stocks whose growth are more tied to the ebbs and flows of the underlying economy.

As for the FAANGs, they have huge valuations for a reason – these companies have built huge franchises, allowing them to still grow fast, despite their size. That’s why, with the exception of Netflix, their stock market valuations have topped $500 billion and Amazon, Apple and Alphabet are approaching the $1 trillion valuation mark.

Related: Facebook, We Have a Problem

The latest earnings reports seem to show that the fortunes of these stocks are starting to diverge. In other words, some companies like Amazon continue to perform, while others like Facebook are facing more headwinds. This makes sense since they are in very different businesses.

  • Facebook’s playing fast and loose with user data resulted in slowing user growth and engagement as well as slowing sales growth.
  • With Google, investors chose to focus on how smartphones contributed to outsized growth and profits, while completely ignoring that Google plays more fast and loose with data than Facebook does.
  • With Netflix, it was expectations that were too high. Its stunning stock-price rally came crashing to a halt after it reported 1million fewer subscribers than investors had expected.
  • Amazon did not disappoint though. It blew past Wall Street earnings forecasts as its diversification into higher-margin cloud computing and the dominance of its online retail business produced the first $2 billion quarterly profit in its history

One area that I will be watching in the weeks and months ahead is whether executives at these firms continue to sell their stock. FANG insiders, led by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg (he sold $2.84 billion of FB stock) are selling stock at the fastest pace in six years. Senior executives and directors of Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google parent Alphabet have disposed of $4.58 billion of stock this year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. They’re on track to exceed $5 billion for the first six months of 2018, the highest since Facebook went public in 2012.

Obviously, continued selling when a stock is still dropping is never a good sign.

What the Future Holds

So what will the future hold for these tech megagiants? Eventually, their growth rate will slow.

As to the why, that was pointed recently by Mary Meeker, a partner at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. She said the landscape was getting more competitive for tech companies now that more than half of the world’s population are online. Internet users will hit 3.6 billion people this year, reaching a majority of the world’s population for the first time, according to a new report from Ms. Meeker. Growth in the number of new internet users is also slowing markedly, she said, from 12% in 2016 to 7% last year. She believes that when you get to a market with 50% penetration, new growth becomes more difficult to find. The smartphone market is proof of that.

She also thinks the giant giants will come more and more into competition with themselves. We already see that in the cloud computing sector with Amazon leading Microsoft and Google. And we are starting to see that in the digital advertising space where Amazon is moving into the territory of Google and Facebook. And also in media where Amazon is taking on Netflix.

So which of these big tech stocks should you own?

I strongly dislike the companies that make money from people’s data – Facebook and Google. I believe they will have to revamp their entire business model as the rest of the world seems to be moving toward European style of regulation to protect citizens’ privacy and away from the American all-is-fair-game model.

I am neutral on Netflix and Apple. Netflix is facing a ton of competition all over the world, including some very heavy competition to come soon from Disney. And its sky-high valuation implies investors are oblivious to the fact that it has competition.

Related: Buy These Streaming Giants as Netflix’s Challenges Grow

I like Apple, but the nearly no-growth global smartphone has me hesitant on it. Although its services business is doing extremely well. I just wish the company would do something innovative, something it hasn’t done since the death of Steve Jobs.

That leaves Amazon and Microsoft, both of which I like a lot. Amazon is already in, or will be soon, every business that touches consumers’ everyday lives. The only thing that could stop the Amazon juggernaut is if the Trump Administration does pursue some sort of anti-trust action.

Microsoft has transformed itself into a growth company once again under the leadership of CEO Satya Nadella. Leading the way is its Azure cloud business. The number of new customer contracts worth more than $10 million for the company’s Azure cloud platform doubled in the latest quarter. Wall Street had been expecting the rate of growth in Azure revenues to moderate, slowing to 77%. But the business continued its recent streak to rise 89% and underpin overall sales growth of 17% to $30 billion, leading to Microsoft’s strongest revenue quarter in years. With Microsoft at or near the lead in edge computing, quantum computing and AI, it and Amazon looks like the best of the big tech stocks.

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