“If bank stocks are the best investments you can find for your portfolio, you should fear for you wealth.” Value Investment Institute, March 2011 Pretty strong words. I came across this commentary on banks from the Value Investment Institute and it prompted me to write this post on the suitability Read more…
I’m not a huge fan of investing in bonds, although I do invest in them from time to time. In general, their prospective returns are lower than stocks, they’re taxed at marginal income rates, and individual bond issues are harder to research/buy/trade than individual stocks. However, the most surprising reasons Read more…
I’ve talked a lot about how much it takes to retire and safe withdrawal rates and ways to increase safe withdrawal rates. See the series of posts here. All of these discussions and studies I reference are based on a certain retirement model. Lets call it the portfolio value retirement Read more…
One of the things I love about investing is the opportunity to constantly learn and become a better investor. Your results are strongly driven by the time and effort you put into the process. In the past few months I’ve been researching an interesting idea I had. Two posts drove Read more…
EPD reported Q4’10 and full year 2010 results on February 17th, 2011 and again they were nothing short of impressive. The full earnings release can be found here. I also highly recommend their earnings calls where EPD always does a nice job of providing additional color to their earnings results. Read more…
In my last post I described the commutative property for dividends, i.e. that a 3% div stock with a 2% growth rate is exactly the same as a 2% div stock with a 3% div growth rate. I showed that the commutative property only holds for investments in non-taxable accounts Read more…
Sometimes it is good to get back to basics. After a recent conversation with a family member, an elementary school teacher, about the school’s decision to rename improper fractions into something else (no, I’m not joking) I ended up thinking about some dividend basics. One of the basic properties in Read more…
Today I want to delve into a widely misunderstood part of the market – mortgage REITs. This misunderstanding creates some great opportunities for income investors to enhance returns and income without taking on much more risk. I’ll focus my discussion on the biggest and best of the mortgage REITs, Annaly Read more…
I think I’ve made it pretty clear that dividend investing is the basis of my investment strategy. Why is that? Well, to summarize; dividends provide higher returns (see this post), dividends enhance returns during bear markets (see this post), dividends account for most of world wide stock market returns (see Read more…
In my first post on the magic dividend formula I discussed how to estimate forward returns using the formula. The formula only requires the estimation of one unknown variable which makes it very easy to use. Today I want to discuss a different form of the exact same formula and Read more…
Last month I introduced my income investor dashboard that helps me keep tabs on the investment landscape from an income investor’s point of view. I’ve updated the dashboard as of this morning. Here it is: I added this month’s updates to the table and calculated the change in yields from Read more…