045 - Which Investor Publications Are Worth Your Subscription

There are so many investing resources available, but not all of them are worth your time or money. 

Since Tim's subscribed to many he can tell you exactly which ones to go with. And don’t worry, most of these are free so you can put your hard earned money into investments. 

If you're just starting out or don't want to be overwhelmed by info, Tim recommends these 2 resources first. 

• Dividend Channel
• Contrarian Outlook

Want FREE weekly market updates, Tim's top 10 dividend picks, and our portfolio updates delivered right to your inbox? Subscribe to our email list.

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**DISCLAIMER**
Ticker metrics change as markets and companies change, so always do your own research. The content in this podcast is based on personal experience and is for educational purposes, not financial advice. See full disclaimer here.

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Transcript

Welcome to Roaming Returns, a podcast about generating a passive income through investing so that you don't have to wait to retirement to live your passions.
Ever confused which sources give you quality investing information? Yeah, there's a ton. Tim subscribes to many and outlines the best ones in today's episode. Tune in to see which two he recommends specifically for newbies.
And don't worry, most of these are free. So you can put your hard earned money into investments. Let's dig into specifics.
What up? Hey guys. If you've watched the market the last week, it's been a shit show because everyone's panicking that, oh, they're not, they may not raise interest rates until September or they may not at all. As a contrarian value investors, well, I don't really give a shit.
Neither should you. More shares at a lower price. But this is what happens.
Life doesn't go according to plan. So you have to plan for the worst, hope for the best, but plan for the worst. That's why income investing is the best approach because as the markets go down, you just pick up more and more shares.
And when things turn around, you make all that value back plus all the dividends in the interim. Well, you're wise. We should update them on what you were talking about this morning with Tesla.
I liquidated the TSLY. Yield max. YieldMax.
And I put it into YMAX because Tesla's just garbage. For whatever reason, that specific one is not managed in a way that makes sense. And we have a sneaky suspicion that it's gonna do the same thing it did before where it's gonna drop down.
They're gonna have to do a reverse. Reverse stock split. Reverse stock split.
Give you less shares. So it's just gonna. To prop the price up.
Head to zero. So literally you're just going down to zero. So we took a $1,200 loss in that.
$1,200 loss to get it. So we're still getting the yield max income because I put it in the YMAX which is basically every yield max they have goes into the YMAX. And I figure that's the least riskiest of a risky invest.
Yes. That's. And the reason that Tesla's.
That's how I sold it to myself. The reason that Tesla's being all stupid is if you actually follow Tesla stock, they had a bunch of news come out. Bunch of not good news.
Like their sales are down in China. China. Their sales are down in America.
They had to recall their trucks because of accelerator sticking which I guess is never a good thing if this accelerator sticks. Probably not. Their margins are shrinking and they're currently probably going to court over whether or not to give Elon Musk some compensation.
So like it's just gonna be a shit show for a while. So I figured I'll just take a little bit of a loss to not have to deal with that. I mean we still have exposure to the Tesla yield max in the YMAX.
So yippee. And I think one of our other funds also includes Tesla in it which isn't a big percent so it's not that big of a deal. But Tesla hit it's 52 week low.
If you look at that chart, open up that baby in Yahoo Finance, it is on the downward trajectory. Usually if it breaks through it's 52 week low, it's gonna drop further. So for those of you who have that or are interested in that, that might be fun to watch play out.
As long as you don't have shares, it's fun to watch play out. But this is why we do not own Tesla. If you have shares, you're gonna be dealing with that emotional bias so oh my god.
And what goes up sometimes comes down and I think Tesla's been overvalued for a while so it's correcting back to wherever. The mean. The mean.
I think it is the mean. I know, we are completely off topic as never has happened before. I just got talked to about that.
She's like the last one she was at, she's like you realize you're all over the place. I'm like yeah, that's how my mind works. Deal with it.
I thought you loved me for me. You don't? Of course I don't love you for you. Today, one of the questions I get from a lot of people, whether it's an email, get your hand out of my face.
Face the mic. Whether it's an email or if it's in person is where do I get my research? I mean I'd like to take credit being this smart, wise man that I am but I actually do a lot of research using other people's research because it actually, I'm able to get more information in a quicker amount of time. Yeah, that's the thing.
You can't be everywhere at once. You can't see everything all the time and if you sub things out or you rely on certain reliable sources for specific things, they go dirty. It's not like I'm not delegating it to an underling which would be hilarious.
Underling, go research for me. That may happen at some point though. It never will.
The research has to be done by you. Because they would come back with research. I'd be like this is all wrong.
So based on that, Tim uses these other resources but he goes and you double check it. You like think about it before you implement anything, right? You just don't take the word for it. Any time, any resource that I use, I research with, basically they have an article or they have a portfolio or they have like a blurb or a text or an email or whatever, I'll actually go in and do my own individual research.
I don't take any, again, nobody cares as much about my money as I do so I don't take anybody at their word. I do the research to make sure that everything's good. But they put him in the right direction or they give him things he might not have caught or what happens a lot of times is they'll be talking about, like say example for a closed-ended fund, they'll be talking about like, let's just hypothetically, a utility closed-ended fund.
Well, when I start doing the research, I come across like 12 of them. So then I'm like, oh, rabbit hole. So I have 12 to research because their one might not be the best.
So then I'm like looking at 11 others and I'm like, well, I like this one better. This one's holdings are better. It's diversification's better.
It's beta's better. Whatever the case may be. So it gives me like a starting point and then I deep dive from there.
So this catches a wide net, but it also helps you narrow focus and save time. I just tried to narrow it down to like the ones that I think an average person could use and benefit from. So the first one that I use a lot is it's called the Dividend Hunter.
The guy that writes it is, his name's Tim Fallon. He, as he likes to say all the time is he flew helicopters in Vietnam or some shit. I don't know.
He talks about it all the time. I basically, this one's a paid one. The first couple are gonna be paid subscriptions.
I paid for it for a lifetime membership. What does the helicopter thing have to do with anything? Cause I don't know. It's just his like marketing thing.
So I guess he's good making decisions under pressure or something. I don't fucking know. I don't know what the flying thing has to do with it.
Nice. But like he's kind of cool because he travels around in an RV like part of the year and then the other part of the year he's in the office. Oh, so he's similar to us.
But what he does is he looks for high yielding. When I mean high yielding, I mean like six, eight, 10, 12, 14%. Not high yielding like all the other experts.
Two, three, four? High yieldings like 4%. So he looks for the high yield and he does, he talks a lot. But if you can get through all the talking you can find different things to look at.
If you pay for the subscription you'll actually have a, he has I think one portfolio he has. But then he also has a, if you're just starting out portfolio, like he lists like three stocks that you, sorry, as an income investor you should pick up. He also has a stock of the week.
I use that stock of the week. I don't think I've actually ever invested in any of his stocks of the week. But like they give me good ideas to research further.
But it's reasonable. So it was $79 for the lifetime subscription. I mean I think he has more expensive stuff, less expensive stuff.
The problem I have with him is he spams you a lot. Like I'll get emails probably two or three times a day where he's trying to sell another subscription, subscribe to something else. Or this, he words it a lot like, well get this dividend stock before it goes ex-dividend on Friday.
And he does that a lot. We'll get an email on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday about his stock on Friday going ex-dividend. It's a lot of spam.
I will tell you that, so what I would probably do, because I've fallen prey to this and my normal email got totally gunked up with this type of stuff. Because they do get very spammy. They want to sell you packages.
The crypto stuff's really bad. Not that we're going to talk about crypto today. But I highly recommend getting a finance investing dedicated email for these types of subscriptions.
Because it'll just keep your personal inbox clean. Because Tim gets so many. Like hundreds a day.
And he does have a lot of special reports that are nice. Like he has a special report on Main Street Finance. He has a special report on Hercules Capital.
So there's a lot of nuggets to use. And you'll see like once we go through all these, you'll see like how if you put them all together you have a wide swath. The second one I use is Utility Forecaster.
I use this one more than the Dividend Hunter. The Utility Forecaster is all utilities. That guy's name, I don't know what his name is.
I forget. Irrelevant. He talks about specific utilities.
But then, I think it's Nathan Slaughter if I recall correctly. How could you forget a name like Slaughter? I was about $200 for a lifetime subscription. It's all about utilities.
You have access to two portfolios. A growth portfolio and an income portfolio. The difference being income is obviously you're just getting income.
You're not worried about growth. Whereas growth is, the growth portfolio is a growth portfolio. But it also has dividends.
They all have dividends because they're all utilities. The caveat is they have to have a growing dividend. But what I really like about this one is he compiles data on every utility.
So like when you go into the spreadsheet you have access to all like 400 utilities. You can literally scroll through and he has it broken down into like a yield, a dividend security, recommended buy price, whether you should buy, hold, or sell. So you have all that.
So it's a really good starting point for everything utility. Then we're talking everything like that includes like media companies. That includes like towers, REITs, telecommunications.
They have a lot of things that they classify as utilities. But it's really nice because each month he has a how they rank category. I don't know what his criteria is but he'll force feed stuff in and they'll give you a list of 10 investment ideas for that month that are ranked one through 10.
Like where he would start. Like if you're just starting in investing say in March you just start to decide I'm gonna start investing in March. If you looked at this it'd have a how you rank for March and it would have 10 stocks to choose from.
Oh that's really cool. But like I said this is a lot of data on a really big section of the market that you then have like literally it's just in a list form. It's really convenient.
That kind of sounds like what you do in the email a little bit for the weekly going ex-dividend but you rank them in the top 10 from our value and income investing perspective. Yeah so like I may. I can see why you like that.
I may, I actually stumbled across that myself. I actually was doing that before I actually subscribed to this. But it just makes it easier for people.
Okay well one through 10. And then I'm like I obviously in the email I give a blurb about which ones I like that week or which ones we hold or which ones we've held previously held. Yeah like I said I mentioned that they have a recommendation on each and every utility investment which is super nice.
Like everyone, comprehensive? Like thousands? Not comprehensive but like I said if you pull it up it's literally a chart of hundreds of utilities and it literally has the ticker number, the price, the yield, the dividend, the dividend security, buy, sell, hold recommendation and if it has a buy recommendation it actually has a target price that you shouldn't buy above. Oh that's really, really nice. And utilities are great if you guys have listened to the utilities episode for all types of investors whether you're risk prone or the more the risk averse type of investor.
The reason that I was okay buying this one for more than a couple dollars is because I plan on having utilities in every portfolio until I die. They're recession proof, they're a hedge, they're safer. They're always growing.
They generally grow between four and 10% per year their dividend. We talked about that in the utilities episode. So it's nice.
The third one is called Sure Dividend. I was using Sure Dividend for a couple years, the free version and I finally upgraded to the paid version I think four months ago it was $79 a year. I probably won't renew my subscription and I'll explain to you why.
Although the only difference between the paid version and the free version is the paid version gives you a deep dive into the 10 investments that they think are the best for that month. So like at the beginning of the month you'll get an email saying this month's issue's available. You go into the issue, they'll have the 10 best investment ideas for that month and they do a deep dive.
When I mean deep dive, I mean deep, deep dive. It's very technical. Very hard to read if you don't like to read technical stock investing stuff.
And that's coming from Tim. The research you get like for example is EPS growth, CAGR growth, five year price prediction, payout ratio, fair value price, dividend safety, estimated annual return, et cetera, et cetera. The number of shares they have.
It's very, very thorough. But if you actually use the free version that you get emails probably I wanna say three to four times a week about ideas. And I know you get one email at the end of the week that gives you like stuff to read over the weekend and you get a lot of the same information in the free version on the weekend.
So like they'll say the dividend aristocrat, the best dividend aristocrats in the list of 10 best and they have all that information that you pay for. So there's really no incentive to spend the money. So I feel kind of stupid that I spent the money but I guess GTK, I don't know.
Well if you look at it from the perspective of these couple of, what is it, less than 100 bucks for these two and the one's a lifer plan, what are you spending on a financial advisor? I understand that but like I. You could equate it to that if. But if you. Or even to get started.
If you research your stuff individually rather than just take people at their word, you're getting the same information. You just have to go through a couple extra clicks. So if you're.
But I'm saying for a one-off. If you're okay with paying for a couple extra clicks, I guess I'm telling you if you pull it up, like they have a list for a lot of stuff and like if you go into it, like that's where I got the idea to invest in 3M long before I actually subscribed to this because 3M was on one of their dividend growers or something list and I looked at it and I was like well all that data looks good. I mean it is broken down nicely like we'll say a current price and the consensus or estimated price that it should be.
So it gives you like a break. Like you can just tell right away without even having to do like a PE research or a peer research, anything of that nature to just tell you right away that 3M was undervalued by like 50%. But then it also goes into everything else about 3M and it was all for free so I don't know why I paid for it to be honest. How do these resources compare to the screener tool? Does this give you different information that obviously wouldn't show up in the screener or is that this kind of more of a moot point because the screener since you've developed it. The screener gives you an idea whereas this gives you details like the screener like literally only has four different things you look at. Well I understand that point but I'm saying this is a different way to get ideas versus using the screener tool.
Yes. So you're using two separate ways because obviously they don't all capture everything for each way. Yeah.
Okay. And then when you do a screener and some of the same investments show up you're like oh I must be on to something. Okay.
Okay. So it's like a backup. It's a reaffirmation.
The fourth one is simply Wall Street. I have not subscribed this one as of yet but I plan on it in the future. The difference between the free and the paid subscription this one is you do this the free one you only get you can only do a deep dive research on five stocks per month whereas if you do the paid you can do up to 20.
This is for whatever you are really comfortable with your screening where you actually have an idea of well I like this one. I like that one. I like this one.
Well you can just plug the ticker number in and they do like a really it's a really deep dive research I think more so than sure dividend but it's not as technical like it's all in pretty pictures and charts and everything. Oh I like that. I hate technical writing.
And with the free one you have you can like if you have a current portfolio you can plug the portfolio into a portfolio monitoring tool for free. You can do one. If you do that you plug in your portfolio then any time you have like an earnings date or a dividend date or an X div or any news from the company comes out they'll actually give you an email at the end of the week saying here's what went on with your portfolio this week.
That's really cool. And you have access to all that but when you pay for it you can do up to three. I think they cap it at 15.
It might be 10 or 15. I don't know. I don't remember the exact number.
10 or 15 what? So if you do the free one you can have a portfolio of 10 or 15. Stocks? Yeah. If you do the paid one you can have up to 45.
So we need the paid one. Okay. I see why you want the paid thing now.
You get the valuation. They have like a estimated fair market value price. They have what it currently is how much it's undervalued.
They have an in-depth look at the P.E. and the P.E. versus the peers. They have an in-depth look at the financials. So it's good for that regard if you like having like say you don't have Schwab and you're in one of those other ones and you don't have access to the financials like Schwab has.
You're going to need to find a place that where you can just plug a ticker in and it gives you all the financials. You're going to need a third party if you're not using Schwab basically. In my experience but I haven't used Fidelity yet.
Yeah Fidelity may. Again we talked about that in last week's episode. So it might.
Now we're going to get down to the important stuff. If you're just starting out. Yeah you want free if you're just starting out.
You want free so you can use your money to invest with. On the these are all free ones from going forward. The first one is Contrarian Outlook.
This literally is everything closing funds. Literally. Literally.
His specialty his name's Brett. I think it's Brett Owens. His specialty is closing the funds like he is like the go to source for closing the funds.
And you know how much we love those. Every day you get an email with a potential closing the fund to purchase or sometimes five it depends. But every day you get an email with a one or more closing the funds that he thinks are good.
He gives you a pretty easy to read breakdown of why he thinks it's a good one. They have a paid one as well. I actually did sign up for the paid one.
The difference between the paid one and the free one is literally just his portfolio. Which isn't necessary if you're starting out. And that's why I think the free ones just as good.
But when if you do the paid one the actual portfolio is nice because it again has it broken down like don't buy above this. Like this is the highest that you should buy it. But if you've ever done any research on closing the funds you know how infuriating they can be because you never know if they're like priced right.
I mean again I hate to keep beating the drum. But in Schwab if you click on a closing the fund it tells you at the very bottom of the ticker page that if what the historical NAV price is like if it's historically a premium or a discount. The one year premium or discount.
And then you can make a determination from there if it's undervalued or even or valued right or if it's overvalued. Contouring Outlook does that as well. So if you don't have access to a brokerage that just tells you right away that hey this is five year discount of 18 percent.
A one year discount of 14 percent. Well then you can go to Contouring Outlook and he'll actually inform you of that. Nice nice nice.
The second one we've already mentioned was SureDividend. I honestly think that you you should have subscribed to SureDividend just for the free one. Like I said like this is where I got ideas for the utility stocks.
This is where I got ideas for the dividend contenders. This is where I got idea for REITs. This is where I got idea for BDCs like they come out with a list of the top 10 whatever pretty much every week.
And then if you do the weekend readings like the last one I got was 18 weekend readings. It did it had lists of REITs. It had list of the BDCs.
It had list of the low volatility high yielding investments. It had a list of the best monthly dividend paying high yield investing. And then it did four deep dives on dividend aristocrats.
So every week you get a list of a lot of stuff to read over the weekend. And it's all part of it because it literally is just like the paid subscription other than they have a not in the paid subscription they have a nice graph like a nice picture of the dividend yield plus the price. And if you know anything when it comes to investing you know there's a dividend magnet.
It's a theory that I think Brett Owen said. But if the dividend should be a mock step with the price. So if there is a discrepancy in the dividend yield and the price if it opens up then you know that dividend is going to pull the price up.
But if the price is well above the dividend yield the price should depreciate until it gets in line with the dividend yield. It's an interesting phenomenon. I might actually need to do an email on that at some point.
I've actually seen that a few of the investing books that I've seen. And that's what they'll do is they'll actually follow those dividend price gaps and they'll buy in and sell depending. If you don't know about that I should be having an email about that coming out at some point.
Where it actually is a very quick and easy way to determine if something's a good buy based on the gap between the price and the dividend yield. We mentioned simply Wall Street. The next one is Investors Business Daily.
I get an email at least one a day from this resource. The only problem is you can't actually control the topics. But you get a lot of ideas from them and they don't take very long to get through.
Like they gave me the idea for DSX was this morning. Yesterday was some REIT I forget. But like you'll get an email every day of saying this is a good high yield investment to research.
And then you just literally click on your brokerage type in what they're recommending look through it and say well is that a good idea or not. So like you get an email every day though. All seven days of the week you get an email saying this is a potentially good investment to look at.
How many of them do you actually agree with? Four. Four of seven. Yeah a week.
That's pretty good actually. And then you'll see like there's two different authors. One's John Whitfoot I think or something like that.
Something like that. Like he's probably a third of the time I say well that's a good one. There's another one that's really good.
He does like a pretty thorough and thorough. Do you know his name? No. The one that I used for years and years and years and years was Yahoo Finance.
And you just click on Yahoo Finance. It's all free and they have so many different articles every day. Tons.
Sometimes it's overwhelming. Where I find the potential for a lot of good information is in the comment section when people are discussing the article. Say for example you're reading an article about the difference between AT&T and Verizon.
And the article discusses it but you go to the comments and someone then people are down there discussing the article and then they'll start giving their two cents about the differences between them. And you look at the comments and you're like well that makes sense. Let me research this further or that doesn't make sense at all.
This person's just a hater. Like in anything the comments are how the average person sees things. So it's very helpful when they're saying oh I hate AT&T.
I hate AT&T. Well that's a good indication that perhaps you should be buying AT&T. That's why when I had the choice for her mother's retirement to buy Verizon or AT&T I read an article on Yahoo Finance that discussed the differences between the two.
At the time Verizon yielded I think 7.3 and AT&T was 7.1. But I went to the comments and most of the comments were about how they hate Verizon and AT&T is the better stock. So I was like as a contrarian I want to buy what people don't want to buy which was Verizon. So that was like one of the leading indicators why I went with Verizon over AT&T.
And that actually played out really well for our favor in like shortly thereafter didn't it? Yeah Verizon was up like 30 percent because they reported their earnings and their earnings smashed it. They just reported earnings this morning and they were pretty good. Now that one thing won't work all the time but I assume it's a cumulative gut instinct.
If you combine all of these together you're going to be just fine. Like this I mean I understand this is a lot of resources and as I said at the top this isn't even close to all of them that I use. Well and I was going to say at the end but I guess I'll throw it in here.
Pick one. Get started. Start immersing yourself.
The only way that you learn is through small snippets over time and then you'll notice that your prowess and your understanding and your information and your comfort confidence and all those things get better over time as you actually start taking this information in. You get you get immersed in the language. You start understanding the terms.
You start actually talking like this. You get more confident in what you're investing in. You start getting those intuitive insights because you're exposed to so much different information and you start to see patterns and you start to have these like your subconscious will actually retain some of the stuff you may not consciously and you won't know why you feel pulled in a certain direction.
Got to double check that that's not a bias but a lot of times it's instinct and instincts tend to point us in the right direction like with what Tim was just talking about with Verizon and AT&T. I mean I think some of the metrics mashed up he was talking to me about it from what my memory recalls but I think I agreed with him even though it was a higher price which is usually something we avoid that like the metrics just lined up in a way that that one made more sense. And FYI I hate Verizon.
Yeah I agree. I'll make money from them. I can't stand Verizon.
I can't stand AT&T. I was gonna say it doesn't matter it's a drop in the bucket. Okay and the last one is probably the best one.
It's called Dividend Channel. It's literally just Dividend. Is it Dividend Channel? It's DividendChannel.com. It has everything like legitimately everything you could ever want from stocks, bonds, ETFs, CDs, preferreds and this is where I go for my preferred stuff because I have just an awesome preferred screener.
In this one you can actually use their screener and you can pick the criteria that you want. Like say you just want to look up close-ended funds that yield eight percent. Will you do that? They'll pull up a list for you.
It has so much stuff. Look at all this. Top 10 high yield baby bonds.
Top 10 oversold dividend stocks. Top 10 stocks going ex-dividend this week. The best high yield stocks.
What the heck is a baby bond? It's a little bond. The best high yield stocks 2014 through 2024. It has everything that you could possibly want.
It's a lot of this one. That could be a lot too much over. A lot of reading.
Overwhelmed for people. But if you like making money, you'll learn to like reading. There's three big ones.
The first one is the preferred ones which I mentioned. The second is the ETFs which I mentioned. The third is they have a link for insider buying.
If you're not familiar with that, that is when people in the company buy the stock of the company for their own portfolios. They have to disclose that. This one has a really good way of finding out what companies are buying their own stock.
If you don't have the common sense when it comes to investing, when a company is willing to buy its own stock, that's a huge good sign. That means that they definitely believe in what's going on. This one is mainly the preferreds and ETFs.
I can't even describe. If you just click on the list, it has a slide. They call it a slideshow.
Let's just do dividend stocks 2024 through 2024. Click for slide one. Click and it tells you all this stuff.
Look at this. It gives you everything you can need. Price per share.
Price and number of shares, total return, current yield, dividend yield, how much your shit would have grown had you just invested $10,000 in it. It would have grown to $274,000. It gives you the website for the company.
They give you everything you could possibly need. It's not too demanding once you get into the actual break, the hyperlink for the different lists. It's actually very clear and concise in almost like a chart type thing.
If you get overwhelmed by a long written word, this is a snapshot with almost like a chart, which is really nice. The reason I like this one is for the preferred. If you click on the preferred, it's at the very top.
Click on the preferred. It'll pull up all the different relevant topics for preferreds. Whenever you click on one, it'll actually pull up all the preferreds that PSEC offers.
Preferred A, preferred B, preferred, I guess just preferred A at this point. It gives you the discount to liquidation. That means like we talked about preferreds long ago.
If it starts at 25, you want to be paying less than 25 for a preferred share just in case they call it back. If they call it back, they'll call it back at 25. If you bought it for 27, you'll lose that two bucks per share that you buy.
Then it gives you the current yield. It gives you the date it went ex-dividend. It gives you the date that it will be called back.
It'll tell you if it's convertible or accumulative. It'll give you the information about the parent company, which I find is very important. It's very difficult to find a resource where if you're researching a preferred, it shows you the data for the company that offered the preferred.
In this particular instance, we're looking at PSEC. They have a preferred share of A, so it's Pro A, but it tells you all the information of the parent company, like how long they've been paying a dividend, their EPS, their market cap, their 52-week price gap. You can then say, well, this one doesn't look that good because their EPS is negative 0.43, so this would be a bad preferred to buy.
That's why I said this makes looking up preferred shares so, so easy. As a newbie when it comes to income investing, you should have, I want to say, probably 10% of your stuff in preferred shares just because they're less volatile and you know what you're getting into. If it's a preferred share of $10 and you're getting it for $6, you know you have a potential for 40% increase in price while collecting the dividends.
The problem is whenever the parent company raises the dividend, the preferred share doesn't go up, so you're not going to get the dividend growth, so this wouldn't be, you wouldn't look for preferreds for like 3M or utility companies because it's better to actually have the stock because you're getting the dividend yield growth. But for the other ones, if you're looking for the little cut down on the risk of them potentially cutting the dividend, these are a good option. This is where I found Queertip, QRTEP.
I found it in here. At the time, it was trading at like $30 per share when it was originally $100 per share. Holy crap.
Are you serious? So yeah, it was a 70% discount. I mean, the parent company is not worth very much, but like they don't like their price. That's insane.
That's actually one of our best growers, isn't it? Their price is only like $1, but everything else was fine. It didn't have a dividend, but its EPS was good, its PE was good, its market share was good, everything. The only thing it doesn't have that I wish it did is they don't have a tab for short interest.
Short interest is important when you're investing. I never actually discussed this, but if you're in, say, a stock that has like 20% of the people holding the stock are on the short, that's bad. I'd actually be really curious to see where Tesla's floating around with the short interest.
Because what a short is, like generally speaking, shorts want the price to decrease. That way they can make money. They're betting on it going down.
So the more people that have short positions, interest or open, meaning that they're trying to actually push the share price down. So for us, that's good to know because then we don't want to buy if it's going to potentially go down. We want to wait for it to go down.
And again, not to toot Schwab's horn, but if you go on the page, it actually tells you on the right column what the short interest is in any investment that you're looking at. Now, is that only for Schwab or is that across the board? It's the only one I've seen. I'll have to look into that.
And TD Ameritrade didn't have it. Vanguard didn't have it. Robinhood certainly doesn't have it.
So it's crazy. That's a huge thing that I've actually never addressed. That might be something else I need to address at some point in an email is the short interest in a stock.
Just like insider buying is a very good bullish indicator, high short interest is a very good bearish indicator. What's interesting is when there's a lot of insiders buying a stock that has a high short interest and it's like, well, what side's going to win? Yeah. Watch this.
Grab some popcorn. Watch that stuff go down. What I generally do in that case, because that actually happened with ABR, is the insiders were buying it hand over foot when it got below $13 and they're still doing it because it's still below $13 and the short interest has increased up to like 5% or 6%.
I generally side with the insiders because they know the company and they know what the company is worth. Whereas you might have to endure like a volatility and a price depreciation in the short term, long term, you should be fine because the insiders know what's going on. So I generally side with the insiders whenever there's a conflict of interest like that.
That makes sense. Except for that case where, what was that stock, that movie we just watched? Dumb Money? Yeah. Oh, GameStop, the GameStop stock, where they got a collaborative of the individuals so they were actually coordinated on the personal front and then they actually were able to overtake or sway the institutions to go the opposite direction.
Now that very rarely, rarely happens because it's hard to organize enough people to make that happen with those big wallets that the institutions and stuff have. Okay. So in conclusion with our resource stuff, the two that I would pick up, I would subscribe to Dividend Channel and I would subscribe to Contrarian Outlook, both the free versions, because you're going to be covering your close-ended funds pretty handily with the Contrarian Outlook.
And then the Dividend Channel, you can research anything else. If I give you recommendations or if you subscribe to email, you get the top 10 investments every week that I think are the best value to think about. You can then plug that into Dividend Channel.
You can look through it and be like, okay, that one's good. That one's bad. So I'd subscribe to Dividend Channel, Contrarian Outlook.
They're free. That way you can use your money and actually invest it. You don't have to worry about spending anything.
And I would actually sign up for my email if you haven't, because you get 10 really good, majority of the time, probably three out of four weeks a month, you get 10 really good, really, really, really good undervalued investments. And then you get one week where there's like six and then I have to plug in four to make the 10 and the four kind of shit. Why would you do that? You should just leave at six at that point.
Do you distinguish which week that is? Oh, he does. He is very upfront and he's like, this one's not that great. Yeah.
I'll just tell, like, I'm pretty, I'm pretty transparent. I'm like, this list we just had last week, there was only two that I would have invested in, PSCC and SCD. And then other than that, Clorox maybe, Lowe's maybe, but like I gave you a list of 10 to look at.
I break it down. I use all of my resources to have a list where it gives you the yield, the profit margin. Profit margin is important because if it has higher profit margin, it means it can keep raising its dividend or maintain its dividend.
And then I give you the PE of the company versus the PE of its peers. That way you can see if it's undervalued compared to everyone else in its sector. So like, I give you everything.
Like I said, it's very simple once you actually subscribe. It gives you the most efficient information. And if you are overwhelmed by the amount of resources and possibly going through all the research and data yourself, Tim synthesizes all of those sources every week for you and puts it through his lens of what's important.
Then I give you 10. I think any person that wants to make passive money can do research on 10 different companies. Yes.
That's definitely a lot more manageable than hundreds and going through hundreds of emails. Because I mean, I can tell you how many emails you delete every day. Hundreds.
I get hundreds of emails. And I know I get spammed with crap. I'm so bad at keeping up with my email.
So that is part of the reason that I actually went the route I did with this is because I didn't want anyone else to actually have to go through as much crap as I have to go through to get to the same information, to the same point. So I do all the heavy lifting, heavy, heavy lifting for you. And then I get like, so then if you just have a couple websites that you can use to research or your brokerage to use to research, I gave you 10 options that you can do it.
Tens and baby steps, literally one at a time. The more you do it, the more comfortable you'll get, the better you'll get, the more confident and like the better investor you'll become in the long run. But I think if I'm interpreting what people are asking when they ask about this is they want to see how knowledgeable I am.
And I'm pretty knowledgeable. I'm not like I don't have a degree in financial planning. I mean, I could.
I was looking at it. I was like, it's not that difficult. But why? Yeah.
Why bother? Why bother? Because then I feel like you might be like restricted to what they deem as worthy credentials or worthy like things you can do. And because what we notice with the media and the financial, what do they call it? The experts in the news and stuff, they can't actually say something is a good company until it hits or checks like 10 boxes. But by that point, it's overbought and the price is too high.
So for us, we'd rather have the freedom to be able to say and suggest things. Yes. Like that's a huge thing that I've been bitching about for years now.
Like when the experts say, hey, this like, for example, I just read the email saying that SPH was a good buy. SPH, if you're not familiar, it's a propane company in the Northeast. They literally just deal in propane.
They are a dividend, I want to say contender. It's been like 20 some years of dividend increase. We had it for like a year in her mother's retirement and I sold it because I was looking at the utility forecaster, that one source that we mentioned previously.
And in the utility forecaster, its EPS had went down the last three years and it was projected to go down the next five years. Number of shares had increased the last three years. It was expected to increase the next five years.
So they're basically diluting the share pool and the earnings per share went down, which is when you have more shares, obviously the combination of those two actually make it even less valuable over time. So I got out of it. I literally just got an email yesterday about how it's a good buy.
And I was like, oh, you guys are way behind. Like it's overvalued right now. You need to get out of it.
Wait for it to pull back. So that is an example of how not being a professional financial planner, I can actually say, hey, get out of that stock because it's all everyone's getting into it because they're all like, hey, this is a great stock to get into. Another great example you were just talking this morning was Triple M. You said that email you got in said, we can't recommend this yet.
We're waiting for X, Y, and Z to happen. You're waiting for the 2025. They expect by the time February of 2025 rolls around, Triple M will either have increased their dividend for this 67th straight year or they'll cut their dividend.
And they said if they cut their dividend, they'll recommend it as a buy. But I bought that months ago when it was like $82 a share. And it's like a hundred and I think it's up to a hundred.
It was like $116. And then they did the spinoff where they got rid of the pharmaceutical health care component. And it went back down to $93.
And now it's back up to like $98. So Tim got it during that dip because he was like, hey, this is undervalued. That came up on his radar.
And then this other company's over here saying, we're not going to recommend this until however long down the road, which at that point, it very well could be overvalued because everybody else is buying it while it was dipped down. And then they're going to recommend it to the general public, which then again is going to push it up even further overvalued. I see that a lot in my research where like stuff that I've had, they recommend buying.
And it's like, I can see that it's on the way down, but I'm holding it because I'm accumulating shares. I know one that they've mentioned last two weeks ago was IIPR, which I got into IIPR months ago again, because it was super undervalued. I got it for like $88 when it should be trading at like 120.
It's at like a hundred right now. And they're saying IIPR is a good time. It's a good value to get into it, which very well, it could be, it could go back up to 120.
So you're making 20%, but it had, and you listened or I subscribed to the email. I actually recommended getting IIPR. I think it was six or seven weeks ago.
I said, this is way undervalued. It yields like 7%. It's the best one on the list.
Had I been doing this five years ago, I was not very good, but through the last five years, I've learned a lot and I'm actually really good at getting undervalued stocks now. Super good. And that's that safety of margin cushion in your portfolio, which is excellent.
And then it keeps you from having your dividends getting eat up by buying in at the wrong time. And if you get on top of some of these resources and get on our email list, you're going to get the combination of things. This week, the email coming out is about popular stocks.
Tesla's on there. And what happens is when the experts say, buy a stock, all the people in Robinhood pile into a stock and it makes it one of the popular stocks. The top 10 popular stocks are actually down 20% for the year.
Going with the herd, losing money. That's essentially the gist of that whole thing. So don't ever listen to what the experts say.
Use the experts for a good potential research starting point and then do your own research. What I tell you when I use these sources that I've just outlined, what ultimately ends up happening is you'll get a recommendation for X, Y, Z. What'll end up happening is when you type in X, Y, Z, you'll see four or five competitors of X, Y, Z that have better EPS, better yield, better PE. Then you'll start veering off from X, Y, Z to one of its competitors and you'll find, hey, that one's undervalued.
That's nine times out of 10. When I buy stuff, it's from one of these resources saying, buy this other stock. I do the research and I'm like, well, this other stock's better than the one they're recommending.
Way better. So for next week, it's probably going to be a really, really interesting episode for those of you who are getting started or you're not sure whether you should have a retirement account or a regular brokerage account. We're going to actually walk through what situation you're in and which way or percents of your income or percents of what you're trying to invest should go in which accounts and why.
So we'll cover Roths, we'll the 401ks, we're going to cover regular savings accounts, the retirement side or the traditional brokerages. We're going to lay that all out, give you a couple of examples. Like if you work with a company that matches yada yada, we'll give you certain circumstances and age is going to factor into some of that.
So we'll outline all that next week. That's going to be a great episode, so make sure you tune in. Do you have anything else to say about this episode? I think we're pretty good.
I think I'm going to butcher what the writer of Sherlock Holmes said, but basically he said, if you don't research, you're making illogical choices. And that pertains to every aspect of life. The more you know, the better decisions you make.
So that's why I came. And the slower you make decisions, the better decisions. Here's all the resources I use so you could be just as cool as me or you can just use me, whichever, I don't care.
We are totally giving you that opportunity, an option to pick Tim's brain every week on the emails. And then once we get the social launched off, we're going to be doing stuff over there as well. So if you guys have questions, you can always hit us up on any one of our socials or shoot an email directly at Tim and we'll create a special episode just for you.
We'll see you guys in the next episode.