I’ve been obsessed with dividend-paying stocks since the sixth grade. I’m not sure exactly what inspired me — it could have been the movie “Wall Street” or the popular T.V. show character Alex P. Keaton (played by Michael J. Fox) — but one day I came home from school and said I wanted to buy five shares of IBM with my savings.
In 1999, I began working for Jono Steinberg’s Individual Investor Group, where I wrote a regular investment column.
Later, I spent five years at Standard & Poor’s editing the company’s flagship investment newsletter, The Outlook. During that time, I also penned my first finance book, The Standard & Poor’s Guide for the New Investor. It was published by McGraw-Hill in 2003, and translated into Chinese a year later.
These days, I tell investors about my favorite dividend-paying stocks in my monthly newsletter, Dividend Superstars. I also edit Weiss Research’s daily e-zine, Money & Markets.
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Hello Nilus, I”m a private investor and trade option spreads. I’m curious to know more about using put call parity to predict dividend yields. Could you possibly provide an additional reference that might elaborate on the analysis
you described in your Dec 2 edition? Thanks for considering, Bob
http://www.sta-ips.com/buil d/index.php You might be interested in Student Transportation of America, the 4th largest publicly traded school bus operator in N. America. Their common yields over 10% and their IPS units(part bond, part common) yields 13% at current depressed price. Can you think of a more recession resistant business than this one? Have put up 20% growth numbers for the 10 years they’ve been in existence.
Nilus Mattive Reply:
January 15th, 2009 at 5:42 AM
Thanks, Paul. Interesting business niche! I’ll certainly take a look at the company.
If you like dividends without much of the risk of the stock diving, check the closed-end fund “ETJ” – it’s currently paying 10% and uses a options collar strategy to minimize risk. The only problem I see is sometimes there is a spread between the ask price and the NAV (but this plagues all closed-end funds). Last time I checked it wasn’t that much (like 2%).