You can find world-class companies with dividends north of 4% and rising. In some special situations you can stalk shares being thrown overboard at lower prices taking healthy dividends (make no mistake, there are plenty that are not) into the double-digit yields. I recently highlighted this using an MLP example whose dividend helped put in a likely bottom for shares that are now 50% higher 3 weeks later.

Any time you try to look around the corner, you're sticking your neck out. I'll be doing that when I take the risk with stops around this second hunch on the other side of 4%. One of the least likely things I'll hear in a few years is: “Thank goodness I signed that deal to get a yield below 4% and locked it up for 30 years with a promise to never raise it...especially now that there is no more inflation anywhere above that level.”

Pictured below is the U.S. Treasury’s Long Bond Yield pushed below 4% by overwhelming demand from bids at increasingly higher bond prices.


Click here to enlarge.

Buyers have been racing to lend their money at lower and lower returns - perhaps in order to learn just how much of the world had borrowed too much at higher return rates.

My crazy prediction, had that stock speculator asked? That research and homework might start mattering again - and that not everything goes up and down together.

My single favorite trade among all the possible big smiles yesterday? My daughter’s, after leaving the office early to carve a pumpkin with her.