Here is the Income Investor Dashboard for May 2011 and my commentary below. As usual I highlighted the sectors in green that became cheaper during the month. Most people would put these in red but I have a bias to looking for opportunities and putting more capital to work which Read more…
There are lots of lies in finance or more subtly put, a lot of things wrong with conventional wisdom. I have trouble deciding which lie is the biggest but definitely one of the candidates is ‘Stocks for the Long Run’ which usually means that buying and holding the market index Read more…
Cash is the best asset class for diversifying your portfolio. This goes against a lot of the traditional investment advice which most of the time recommends bonds as the diversifying asset class. This is particularly true for retirement portfolios. In this post I want to take a look at bonds Read more…
The price you pay for an investment is the primary determiner of risk. Plain & simple. As legendary value investor Seth Klarman puts it; Risk is not inherent in an investment; it is always relative to the price paid. Uncertainty is not the same as risk. Absolutely! I find that Read more…
With the end of Q1 2011 upon us, and earnings reports to start coming soon, I thought it was a good time to re-look at MLP valuations, specifically the top 5 market cap MLPs and the Alerian MLP index. I posted on year end 2010 values in this post. Below Read more…
Most investors, especially US investors, invest almost exclusively in their own country. There is even a name for this in the investing world, home country bias (see the link here). In many ways it is a quite reasonable and understandable phenomenon especially if you follow a maxim like invest in 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…
Tech stocks, especially some of the big cap names, are transitioning to becoming great dividend stocks, in particular great dividend growth stocks. I’ve written about this rising trend previously (here). Also, I wrote about MSFT in particular, here, when it was at $24, although I didn’t think it was cheap Read more…
I’ve covered one of my alternative investment strategies for retirement portfolios already, in my post on structured products. Today, I’ll introduce the primary strategy I use to generate income from my cash balance – option selling. Cash is an important part of any asset allocation. It allows an investor to Read more…
Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) is another of the big cap MLPs. Along with KMP and EPD it makes up a good portion of the Alerian MLP index. Like my earlier posts on KMP and EPD this post takes a look at the partnership’s historical performance and how its positioned for Read more…
In an earlier post I discussed the big boy of the MLP space, Kinder Morgan. Today, I’ll talk about the new big boy in the MLP space, Enterprise Products Partners (EPD). EPD is now the largest MLP by market cap. Like KMP, EPD’s historical performance as an investment is downright Read more…