Here's your weekly helping of interesting investing information and insights. Food For Thought This week I got hit with a record dividend payment in my non-retirement accounts... $586.89! But something still messes with my head a little, even after doing this for years: my net worth did not go up by $586.89 when that money arrived. The second those dividends hit, the companies I own just moved money from their balance sheet to mine. That’s it. If that sounds like a buzzkill, it’s not meant to...
10 days ago • 5 min read
Here's your weekly helping of interesting investing information and insights. Food For Thought I've seen this comment so many times about SCHD: "Why buy SCHD at 3.27% when a 2-year Treasury pays 4.09% — risk-free?" A higher yield with zero risk? Who'd say no to that? Calling a Treasury 'risk-free' just means you're guaranteed to get your interest and your principal back from the government. But what's often left out is that getting your dollars back doesn't mean those dollars will be worth as...
17 days ago • 7 min read
Here's your weekly helping of interesting investing information and insights. Food For Thought I still can't believe how many people invest in covered call ETFs and swear by them, but unless I'm looking at different data, 99% of them make no sense to me. Because the second a fund sells a covered call for immediate income, it's agreeing to completely cap its upside. Take the Global X S&P 500 Covered Call ETF (XYLD) — one of the oldest, most respected covered call funds out there. $10,000 at...
24 days ago • 4 min read
Here's your weekly helping of interesting investing information and insights. Food For Thought You love it when dividends hit your account. I love it. Even John D. Rockefeller loved it. If you're reading this, you probably have a passion for passive income. But there's something I wish I knew on day one... Dividends DO NOT increase your net worth. Dividends are a net-worth-neutral event (not including any taxes you might have to pay). Wait. What?! Dividend checks don't increase your net...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Here's your weekly helping of interesting investing information and insights. Food For Thought You love it when dividends hit your account. I love it. Even John D. Rockefeller loved it. If you're reading this, you probably have a passion for passive income. But there's something I wish I knew on day one... Dividends DO NOT increase your net worth. Dividends are a net-worth-neutral event (not including any taxes you might have to pay). Wait. What?! Dividend checks don't increase your net...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Here's your weekly helping of interesting investing information and insights. Food For Thought We just booked a flight to Florida, and when we searched, guess what we cared about? The price. Airlines are a perfect example of what happens when most customers stop caring about brand and just go for the cheapest option. Pulak Prasad nails this in his great book What I Learned About Investing from Darwin. He talks about what happens to industries where customers stop caring about brand and just...
about 1 month ago • 6 min read
Here's your weekly helping of interesting investing information and insights. Opinion So the Canadian banks raised their dividends again this week. Big surprise. Toronto-Dominion Bank (TD) has been paying dividends every single year since 1857... Even Abraham Lincoln was still alive. Let's talk about that — because TD taught a really important lesson about reactive selling that's going to shape how positions get managed going forward. On August 21st, 2024, scary headlines hit. TD was setting...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Here's your weekly helping of interesting investing information and insights. Opinion You might not know this, but Home Depot (HD) is often called "the orange box" — and the market kicked that box down a flight of stairs. Once HD dropped below $300, I started a position in my Roth IRA. Some people have a weakness for women in miniskirts and boots. Mine? Well-known companies whose stock prices have been beaten down. SimplySafeDividends.com Right off the bat, look at what you're getting at this...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read
Here's your weekly helping of interesting investing information and insights. Opinion So I'm sitting in bumper-to-bumper rush hour traffic the other day and I'm thinking about Cornelius Vanderbilt and his massive fortune. As one does. This guy died the richest man in America. We're talking more money than the U.S. Treasury had at the time because of the railroad and shipping empires he built. And within 50 years of him being in the ground, his descendants had blown through pretty much all of...
2 months ago • 4 min read