Income Investing

12 Top Dividend Growth Stocks for Small-Cap Investors Who Want Compounding and Upside

Leave a Comment / Dividend Stock Screen / Shailesh Kumar, MBA / May 13, 2025

Looking for dividend stocks with serious growth credentials? This screen might be your new favorite tool. We’ve filtered the universe of small-cap stocks to find the rare breed that offers not just income, but rising income. Each of the 12 companies on this list pays a dividend yielding between 1.5% and 3.75%. Respectable, but not […]

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Building a Safer Income Stream: Preferred Stock ETFs vs. Dividend ETFs

Leave a Comment / Preferred Stock / Shailesh Kumar, MBA / May 9, 2025

Don’t Risk Your Retirement on the Wrong Yield Strategy As an income investor, you want to maximize your income. But more than that, you want a reliable and consistent income stream. As interest rates fluctuate and market volatility threatens your income stream, choosing between preferred stock ETFs and traditional dividend ETFs becomes more than just

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The Hidden Risks of BDCs No One Talks About (Until It’s Too Late)

Leave a Comment / Business Development Companies / Shailesh Kumar, MBA / May 2, 2025

Business Development Companies (BDCs) can look like dividend gold mines. The headline yields are often double or triple what you get from blue-chip dividend stocks or bond funds. But as you already know, the market doesn’t hand out high income without attaching strings. The problem is, these strings are often buried in footnotes, cloaked behind

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BDC ETFs vs Individual BDCs: What’s the Smarter Way to Invest?

Leave a Comment / Business Development Companies / Shailesh Kumar, MBA / April 17, 2025

One Basket or a Few Carefully Chosen Eggs? BDC investing can appear deceptively straightforward, and that’s exactly where many investors misstep. Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) promise diversification, ease of use, and a quick route to yield generation. For the time-starved investor, they seem like the perfect plug-and-play solution. But as every serious value investor knows, convenience

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How to Analyze Closed End Funds Like a Professional Portfolio Manager (And Avoid Getting Burned by Yield Traps)

Leave a Comment / Closed End Funds / Shailesh Kumar, MBA / April 12, 2025

Closed end funds (CEFs) offer high yields that catch the eye, but the real story hides behind those numbers. If you rely only on the headline yield, you risk buying into a fund that’s eroding its own capital or masking poor performance with financial engineering. Professional portfolio managers dig deeper. They examine how the distribution

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Dividend Yield vs. Total Return: The Mistake That Costs You Millions

Leave a Comment / Income Investing / Shailesh Kumar, MBA / April 8, 2025

Income investors everywhere are familiar with the siren song of the dividend yield. Dividend yield offers comfort. It promises passive income and makes a stock feel like a steady paycheck. But if you’re chasing yield without looking at the full picture, you’re likely leaving serious money on the table. In fact, focusing on dividend yield

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How to Use Preferred Stock ETFs as a Hedge in a Volatile Market

Leave a Comment / Preferred Stock / Shailesh Kumar, MBA / April 4, 2025

Volatility is the one guest at your investing table that never fails to show up uninvited. It rattles your nerves, distorts valuations, and tests your resolve. But as a value investor, you don’t need to fear volatility — you need to understand how to use it. One tool often overlooked in this regard is the

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Why Closed-End Funds Might Be the Most Misunderstood Investment on Wall Street

Leave a Comment / Closed End Funds / Shailesh Kumar, MBA / April 3, 2025

Everything You Need to Know About Investing in Closed End Funds—From Discounts to Dividends and Beyond Introduction: The Opportunity Hiding in Plain Sight If you’ve spent any time exploring income investments, you’ve probably come across closed-end funds (CEFs)—and maybe skipped past them. They’re often lumped together with mutual funds and ETFs, yet behave nothing like

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How to Build a Dividend Growth Fortress That Survives Any Recession

Leave a Comment / Dividend Growth Stocks / Shailesh Kumar, MBA / April 2, 2025

Why You Need a Recession-Proof Dividend Growth Strategy Today You’re not just building a portfolio. You’re building protection—against inflation, uncertainty, and the next bear market. While most investors are glued to CNBC and trading apps, worrying about when the next rate hike will crush their growth stocks, you’re taking a very different approach. You’re quietly

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Dividend ETFs vs. Building Your Own Portfolio: When to Choose Each

Leave a Comment / Income Investing / Shailesh Kumar, MBA / March 31, 2025

You want consistent, growing income. The kind that frees you from the anxiety of market volatility and makes your wealth feel real. You’ve probably considered dividend ETFs—the set-it-and-forget-it kind of investing that promises instant diversification and ease. But if you’re serious about compounding wealth through dividends, a deeper question remains: Should you build your own

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