Detective Commentary

What Happened?
A spate of weak economic reports, especially home sales and unemployment, stoked fears that the economy was heading back into recession. However, the mood turned upbeat as soon as September arrived and last Friday’s “not as bad as expected” employment report helped to moderate double-dip recession fears.

What’s Next?
In our view, we’re not out of the woods yet. Economic reports will probably remain mixed and the market will likely continue to overreact to each one. We're still advising a cautious approach. Hope for the best but be prepared in case the market dips. Continue to invest only cash that you won’t need for six to 12 months so that you can wait out unexpected market downturns.

“Monthly Dividend Scoreboard”
That’s the new name for our unfiltered (not researched) list of more than 100 stocks and funds paying monthly dividends. These could be regular stocks, trusts, bond funds, real estate investment trusts; you name it. The only qualification is that they pay at least 3% yields. But we’ve done much more than rename the portfolio.

The Monthly Scoreboard, now updated daily, sorts the list into categories such as corporate junk bonds, utilities, preferreds, etc. The Scoreboard lists the 12-month, year-to-date, and one-month returns, as well as our experimental “trend score” for each category and for each security within a category.

You can use it to see which monthly-payers are doing the best right now. Check it out and tell us what you think. By the way, the regular Dividend Scoreboard that we added last month does the same thing for all high-dividend categories, not necessarily monthly payers.

New Picks
This month, we’re adding one new pick to our Preferred portfolio that is paying an expected 6.9% yield, and, as an added bonus, has 6% appreciation potential. However, this preferred is below investment quality (junk) rated, so it’s suitable for speculative funds only.

We’re also adding a new master limited partnership to our Energy Partners portfolio that is paying an expected 8.4% yield.

Rating Changes
A recent event has dramatically improved the outlook for one our Partnerships Ex-Energy portfolio picks, and we’re upgrading it to “buy” from “do not add.”

In our Preferreds portfolio, we’re upgrading one “do not add” rated preferred to “buy” and downgrading another “buy” rated issue to “do not add.”

Due to falling natural gas prices, we’ve downgrading two “buy” rated Canadian Energy picks to “do not add.”

Sell
The outlook for one long-time member of our Manufacturing & Services portfolio has markedly deteriorated over the past few weeks.

Sample Portfolio Changes
We’re replacing one pick each in both our Conservative and Growth & Income Sample Portfolios.

For the details, please go to our Premium Subscriber's page. 

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