Dividend-News

How To Retire Today: Dividends

Published Mon, 11 Jun 2018 08:00:00 -0400 on Seeking Alpha

This research report was produced by The REIT Forum with assistance from Big Dog Investments.
Lately, I’ve been hearing from investors about the importance of total return.

More specifically, I’ve been hearing about how total return doesn’t matter.
This is a tricky subject because there are very important factors to consider on each side.
When should investors not worry about total return? Investors shouldn’t be worried about watching total return on their position over the next few hours or the next few days.

Source: Google images
If they feel compelled to check their accounts daily, they are speculating rather than investing.
When an investor buys a very high credit quality bond and intends to hold it until maturity, they shouldn’t be concerned with the total return in the meantime. Often, bonds will trade on dealer markets that are less favorable to retail investors than the broader stock markets. To be clear, I’m saying dealer markets are worse for investors than the broad market is for investors.
If the investor buys into an index fund shortly before it drops by a couple percentage points, they shouldn’t sweat it unless they intended to trade the position actively. The REIT indexes, like the Vanguard Real Estate ETF (VNQ), iShares U.S. Real Estate ETF (IYR) and the Schwab U.S. REIT ETF (SCHH), will correlate heavily with interest rates in the short term. However, over the longer term, the... Read more