The prediction drums of the financial news media continue to grow in volume with predictions of the next economic recession and possible stock bear market. You are probably starting to wonder if these predictions are accurate and if you should make changes in your investment portfolio.

The fact is the economy will go into a recession at some point. The growth and recession cycle of the economy remains intact. The challenge is that no one can accurately predict when the next recession will arrive. You can help your portfolio for when the next downturn will hit with some defensive stock picks.

Keep in mind that a recession is a period of negative economic growth. It is not an economic collapse. Many companies will continue to do well through the downturn. The companies and stocks at risk are those dependent on either strong economic growth or have high debt loads that will crush profits if a company experiences even a minor slowdown in revenue.

Related: 3 Recession Proof High-Yield Dividend Stocks

An economic recession will likely trigger a bear market in the stock market. You can’t avoid a stock portfolio value drawdown, but you want to own shares of companies that will not be negatively affected by the slower economy. Earning dividends through a market drop and recovery helps you come out of the next recession ahead of the game.

I personally think we are two to three years or longer out from the next economic slowdown. I could be wrong. If you believe the next recession is right around the corner, or out in the more distant future, it would not hurt to have some dividend paying, recession resistant investments in your portfolio. Here are three to consider.

When the economy runs into trouble, it most effects individuals who can lose jobs, see pay cuts, or even not be able to make house payments. Young workers may move back in with their parents. These individual problems are good for the local self-storage locations.

Extra Space Storage (NYSE: EXR) owns or manages almost 1,600 self-storage properties with 115 million rentable square feet. EXR is a real estate investment trust, which means it must pay out the majority of net income as dividends to investors.

This company is conservatively managed, with a focus on growing the dividends paid to investors. The EXR dividend has grown by a compounded 12% annual rate over the last decade. In a recession, Extra Space will be able to keep its properties fully rented and also be able to buy additional properties that are less well run.

EXR currently yields 4.0%.

Even in tough times people will find the money to pay their utility bills. Utility stocks are viewed as a safe haven by stock market investors, and the belief is justified.

These are the highly-regulated companies that provide electric power, natural gas, and water to homes and commercial customers. The regulatory agencies approve the rates a utility charges. Rates are set so that the utility can cover the infrastructure spending to maintain and upgrade its assets and then earn a fixed rate of return above the necessary capital spending. The locked in regulated profit margins gives a high level of cash flow predictability.

More recession protection: Buy This 8.4% REIT That’s Raised Dividends Every Quarter

For this market sector I like the Reaves Utility Income Fund (NYSE: UTG). This is a closed-end fund that owns a diversified portfolio of utility and related stocks. Reaves Asset Management focuses only on utility and infrastructure stock investments.

UTG has paid a dividend every month since it launched in 2004. That means it operated through the last recession and bear market. The dividend has never been cut and has been increased 10 times.

UTG currently yields 7.0%.

Grocery stores are another recession proof industry. To cover this industry and earn dividends, I like REITs that earn most of their revenue from grocery store anchor tenants.

Brixmor Property Group (NYSE: BRX) owns 471 open air shopping centers. The company focuses on centers that are the center of their communities. Anchor tenants are the main revenue drivers for Brixmor, and over half of those tenants are grocery stores.

The REIT pays out just 54% of FFO, meaning the dividend is secure. The payout to investors has grown by 7% per year.

Current yield is 7.0%. This grocery focused REIT could just help you pay for the groceries through the next economic recession.

The countrywide legalization of Cannabis sales on October 17 by Canada has set off a modern gold rush by investors. Since pot is still illegal by Federal law in the U.S. the handful of Canadian cannabis companies that trade over-the-counter in the U.S. and have been bid up to astronomical values.

The belief is that legalization will spread to other countries, and that there is a huge market for cannabis for both therapeutic and recreational uses.

At this point the 10 largest publicly traded Canadian pot companies have a combined market cap over $40 billion. They operate in a market that is forecast to have global sale of $11 billion this year. That’s a lot of hope for the future!

I think that cannabis will be a growth product, but not at the pace envisioned by the investors currently scooping up the Canadian pot stocks. These stocks are in balloon race sized bubble territory and I suspect will eventually come back to earth, with many failings to survive as going entities. I don’t like playing craps with my investment dollars. I live in Nevada, so I can get better odds plus free drinks at the local casino.

Related: Buy These 3 Stocks to Profit From Marijuana Legalization

From 8 Things You May Not Know About the California Gold Rush by the History Channel, we can learn an applicable lesson from numbers six and seven:

6. Prospecting for gold was a very costly enterprise. I apply this to investors trying to pick winners vs. losers from the new crop of pot producing companies.
7. More fortunes were made by merchants than by miners. More reliable revenue, growth and profits will likely come from companies that provide the necessary infrastructure and supplies to the pot industry.

With these lessons in mind here are two stocks that should experience growth from the pot boom, and be solid dividend paying companies. I am after all, the Dividend Hunter.

It is very possible that you are familiar with The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company (NYSE: SMG). Scotts is the world’s largest marketer of branded consumer lawn and garden products. In the case of the pot market, the company offers the necessary solutions to enhance the abilities of a marijuana business to produce product.

Scott’s Hawthorne division focuses on products for hydroponic and cannabis businesses. Last year the division had 55% of its sales to California pot growers. As cannabis is legalized in more states, so Hawthorne’s market should grow.

While you wait for pot to become the “next big thing” by actually becoming big business, SMG is an attractive dividend stock.

The payout is growing by 5% per year and the shares yield 3.0%.

Innovative Industries Properties (NYSE: IIPR) is a REIT that calls itself “The Leading Provider of Real Estate Capital for the Medical-Use Cannabis Industry.”

The company owns a portfolio of specialized industrial and greenhouse buildings, 100% leased to state-licensed medical-use cannabis growers.

IIPR came to market with a December 2012 IPO. This is a real business with real assets generating real revenue and profits. Results have been very good, and the quarterly dividend has grown from $0.15 per share to start 2017 to $0.35 per share for the dividend paid this month.

The stock currently yields 3.25%.

Dividends or growth? Why choose?

There’s a widespread belief that stocks and funds can deliver red-hot capital gains or substantial income, but not both. Fortunately for us that’s not true.

It is possible to collect big dividends and capital appreciation. I’m going to show you how to safely collect 32% in total returns in less than a year from a big dividend payer. And while this “easy dividend money” has been made, we’ll discuss three more stocks yielding around 8%-9% that can deliver 20%+ in dividends and upside over the next twelve months..

Income investors like you and me should focus on total returns, which are made up of dividends and price appreciation. The latter, price gains, are driven by a combination of:

• Growth in the actual business, which naturally makes a stock worth more.
• Dividend increases, which drives investors to buy up stocks and funds alike.
• A climb toward fair value (say, the closing of the discount window in a closed-end fund, or a higher multiple on a REIT’s funds from operations)

The first two drivers are what sent AllianceBernstein (AB), which I highlighted back on Dec. 16, 2017, to market-clobbering returns ever since. I pointed out some optimistic analyst outlooks for the stock, as well as widening operating margins and an unorthodox but upward-trending distribution. Sure enough, AllianceBernstein proceeded to churn out 35% in adjusted profit growth over the next three quarters, then returned every cent of that back to investors.

The results? Total returns of 32%. That’s 22% in growth, and another 10% in dividends, for a total return that has quintupled the S&P 500 over the same time frame!

AB Delivers 10% in Dividends Plus 22% Upside

Now, let’s look at some more high-yield stocks of about 8%-9% that can deliver similar upside over the next year.

Senior Housing Properties Trust (SNH)
Dividend Yield: 9.5%

Senior Housing Properties Trust (SNH) is a Baby Boomer play that’s pretty much exactly what you would expect from its name, but also more. Of its 443 properties across 42 states and Washington, D.C., 50% are senior living communities. However, SNH also boasts life science centers (23%), medical office buildings (21%), wellness centers (3%) and skilled nursing facilities (3%) – other types of businesses that should flourish with the aging of the Boomers.

But there’s another reason to like Senior Housing Properties’ business right now, and that’s its focus on privately paying customers. In fact, the company boasts “limited government funding exposure,” with 97% of its net operating income coming from private-pay properties. That looks like it could be increasingly important with Congress starting to beat the drums on “entitlement reform” (that’s politician-speak for reducing Medicare, Social Security, etc.)

The basic business case is there. What should give SNH an extra kick in the pants? For one, analysts are expecting an outsize year of profits in 2018 before it “pulls back” in 2019 – though still to levels about 34% higher than they were in 2017. Value should play a role, too. A pullback in real estate this year has swept up Senior Housing and brought it to a valuation of less than 11 times its TTM funds from operations. Tack on a nearly 10% dividend, and you’re looking at likely total returns of 20%-plus over the next year.

Starwood Property Trust (STWD)
Dividend Yield: 8.9%

Mortgage REIT Starwood Property Trust (STWD) has a portfolio of more than $12 billion, primarily invested in first mortgage loans but with exposure to mezzanine loans, subordinated mortgages, commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) and a few other investments.

This is a diversified pie no matter which way you slice it. By property type? Office (32%), hotel (22%), multi-family (13%), mixed use (12%) and several others. By region? West (27%), Northeast (26%), Southwest (16%) and again others, and even including 9% international exposure.

But the thing I love most about Starwood is its one big imbalance.

Mortgage REITs historically have performed poorly when interest rates head higher. However, roughly 95% of Starwood’s portfolio is floating-rate in nature, and in fact the company expects to its cash flow to increase in a rising-rate environment. And what do we have right now?

A Rising-Rate Environment

The Federal Reserve has signaled that more rates are coming at least this year and next, and Starwood Property Trust is well-positioned to ride this wave higher. Its 9% dividend yield, meanwhile, will pad those returns.

Sabra Health Care REIT (SBRA)
Dividend Yield: 8.4%

Next up, I want to double down on one of the other picks I made last December – Sabra Health Care REIT (SBRA), which also has had a nice run since my call, tripling the total return of the S&P 500.

Let’s Double Dip in Sabra!

Sabra is similar to SNH in that it’s a Boomer play – 72% of the portfolio is skilled nursing/transitional care real estate, as well as 23% senior housing (89 properties leased, 24 managed) and the rest in “specialty hospitals and other.”

Sabra did hit some turbulence after a multibillion-dollar merger in 2017, as well as a prorated dividend, though it made good on that and even hiked the payout after that.

The business clearly is on the right path. Full-year adjusted AFFO came to $2.31 in 2017, up from $2.26 the year prior. And in 2018, AFFO for the first six months of the year has come to $1.14 – that’s up from $1.10 during the same period last year, and makes for a safe 127% dividend coverage.

Earn a 28% Return in 1 Year From America’s Safest Stocks

I like the three stocks I’ve outlined above, but I’m in love with a set of four new high-yield, total-return plays that my research has produced.

In fact, I haven’t been this excited about an income opportunity in years.

What if I told you that you could turn some of Wall Street’s most exciting, growth-oriented blue chips, such as Visa (V)and Google-parent Alphabet (GOOGL), into “double threat” holdings that deliver double-digit upside and 8%-plus dividends? Well, given that Visa pays less than 1% and Alphabet doesn’t deliver a single penny in income, you’d probably call me crazy …

… right until the moment you saw my new discovery: “Dividend Conversion Machines.”

These stocks have extremely specialized businesses that allow them to do the seemingly impossible: They can actually wring high-single-digit dividends from some of the most skinflint companies in America. One of my Dividend Conversion Machines takes Visa’s 0.6% payouts and magnifies it to 9.2%. Another one can take Google’s 0% and produce a 9.4% yield out of thin air.

And no, this isn’t an options strategy, or some dangerous derivative, or the “next Bitcoin.” What I’m going to show you is perfectly SAFE – it’s essentially the same as buying traditional American blue-chip stocks. In fact, I’ll even show you the four steps you’ll need right now:

1. Launch your web browser.
2. Go to your trading account.
3. Instead of entering a buy order for, say, Disney by entering the stock’s “DIS” symbol, enter the 3-letter code for one of my 4 Dividend Conversion Machines instead.
4. Instead of getting Disney’s 1.6% dividend, start collecting an 8%+ income stream!

That’s it!

With the stock market collapsing 6% from its all-time high in just two weeks, a lot of people are freaking out.

Don’t follow them!

Because now is the best time to buy we’ve seen in a long time.

Before I show you my top 3 “buy now” indicators—which are all blaring green—and a bargain 7.5%-yielder to jump on now, let me first say that we’ve been here before.

In mid-February, with the market again on its back, I urged readers not to panic. This has happened since:

A Quick Recovery

While a 1.6% total return in 8 months isn’t much to write home about, it’s not the massive loss a lot of investors are terrified of today. Plus, an 8-month period is so short to be almost meaningless. Check out how investors who bought during the big correction in early 2016 have done:

You Can Choose Contrarian Outperformance …

But if you’d waited until the market started recovering fully in April 2016, you’d have a far smaller return:

… Or Diminished Profits

We are now in a similar position with stocks. But given the wild swings we’ve seen in the last few weeks, I understand if you’re still skeptical. That’s why I’ve written up the 3 rock-solid “buy now” indicators I’ll show you next.

Buy Indicator No. 1: Third Quarter Profits Are Soaring

In both the first and second quarters of this year, S&P 500 firms reported earnings that demolished expectations and delivered record growth.

That trend isn’t stopping.

While it’s early for third-quarter reports, so far the news is good. Net profit margins across the S&P 500 are 11.6%, which is where they were in the first quarter. That’s far ahead of what we’ve seen in the last 5 years:

Q3 Brings “Levitating” Profits

When all is said and done, analysts expect 19.2% earnings growth on a year-over-year basis for the third quarter, which is miles ahead of the 3.5% annualized growth in the last decade. It also means stocks are the cheapest in years—the S&P 500’s forward P/E ratio is at 15.7, way below its historical average:

Stocks Getting Cheap

With higher earnings and lower stock prices, this is a rare buying opportunity.

Buy Indicator No. 2: Fatter Paychecks, Higher Spending

The good news isn’t just limited to companies—that would be a bad thing! Average Americans are doing better, too.

Since March of this year, average weekly earnings have risen more than 3%, the fastest growth since 2010. The trend has lasted longer this time than back then, when we saw wages rise above 3% for just 2 months in a 5-month period.

Salaries Swell, Retailers Rejoice

Note that the line is both staying above 3% and is in an uptrend. That rise has broken a resistance level wages saw throughout 2014 and most of 2017:

Wage Gains Break Out

The wage news is incredibly good and keeps getting better. When Americans have more money in their pockets, they go shopping. That’s helped corporate revenue: all told, S&P 500 companies’ sales are up nearly 5%, the highest year-over-year growth in nearly a decade.

Buy Indicator No. 3: Hitting “Snooze” on the Recession Alarm

The final good piece of news is something I covered in-depth in my October 15 article.

Earlier in 2018, many financial analysts and journalists fretted that the flattening trend in the yield curve (or the spread between the yields on the 2-year and 10-year Treasury notes) would usher in a recession in the next year or so. This was reasonable: an inverted yield curve has preceded every modern recession on record.

But the trend toward a flatter yield curve suddenly stopped in September:

A Dangerous Sign Fades Away

This remains one of the greatest indicators of financial health in the United States, so we need to keep a close eye on it. But for now, the odds of a 2019 recession are vanishing.

1 Fund (Paying 7.5% in Cash) to Buy Now

If the economy is booming and earnings are still rising, now may be the worst time to sell—especially since everyone else is. So you could buy the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) and get a strong return over the next few months.

But you could get a stronger return with a fund like the John Hancock Tax Advantaged Dividend Income Fund (HTD).

Why? For one, HTD has crushed the S&P 500, despite its focus on large-cap value companies:

Dusting the Benchmark

With a 405% total return in the last decade versus 274% for the S&P 500 index fund, HTD has a proven track record. And it notches gains like that while delivering a 7.5% dividend, giving us a serious income stream we can use however we like.

The market hasn’t rewarded HTD, however; despite its solid track record, the fund trades at a 7.9% discount to net asset value (NAV, or what it’s underlying portfolio is worth), far lower than where it traded in late 2017:

HTD Goes on Sale

When the market recovers, I expect HTD’s NAV to rise, helping it deliver capital gains.

But I also think other investors will realize HTD’s solid performance when its NAV rises, causing more bidding pressure to result in a smaller discount, compounding HTD’s return. Investors who buy now can enjoy the fund’s 7.5% dividend while they wait for that to happen.

Your Best Selloff Buy Now: 8.4% Dividends and Big 2019 Gains

Here’s something else I need to tell you: the selloff knocked one of my top 4 CEF buys to an amazing 14% discount to NAV!

In plain English, that means we’re getting this standout fund’s portfolio—top-notch high yielders like Ventas (VTR) and Enbridge (ENB)—for just 86 cents on the dollar!

This bargain fund then takes these stocks’ massive dividends (plus the upside its veteran managers squeeze from its rock-solid portfolio) and hands them to you in the form of a huge 8.4% dividend paid monthly!

Your Monthly “Paychecks” Await

This is the perfect investment for today’s churned-up markets. Because thanks to this fund’s huge discount, my team and I have it pegged for easy 20% price upside in 2019.

And that’s on top of its incredible 8.4% CASH dividend!

Plus, you get some invaluable downside protection, because even if we get hit with an unexpected market collapse, we’re still covered: thanks to this fund’s big markdown, it will just trade flat—and we’ll still pocket its massive 8.4% payout!