When times are good, investing is all about capital gains. Then there are the times like the present day. Investing advice is all about safety and income. Too often it boils down to — buy this dog that has been beaten down so far it looks like up to me, and hope you can remain solvent longer than the market remains irrational about it.
But sometimes there is a different story.
At a time when the Federal Reserve’s policies have decimated savings accounts, savvy preferred stock investors continue to earn 7% yields from the highest quality preferred stocks at what many agree is acceptable risk.
The idea is that a preferred stock is not particularly correlated with the common, and so is not subject to the fluctuations of a volatile but basically sideways market, but exists to provide a healthy income for the buyer. After filtering for safety and return, Le Du finds
we are left with about 150 extremely high quality preferred stocks to pick from….
More details will follow tomorrow: it’s a two-part article. But a commenter mentions Quantum Online, a site that specializes in preferred stocks in particular, and income investments in general.
As is so often the case, this article addresses what to buy, but not when, or when to sell. ASAP is the implicit answer, and sell when you need the money for something else. Fair enough — for me an income investment is not the goal, merely a parking lot along the way.
UPDATE: part 2 of 2.