If I had to select people to manage my money, there are only two people that I can think of that I would trust sufficiently to generate good performance – James Hymas and David Merkel. One can easily tell by how they write that they have very disciplined and narrow-focused techniques for generating market-beating performance.
On Merkel’s site, he has a small gem of a paragraph which seems to be quite relevant to increasingly aggressive investors that are chasing yield at any cost:
[…] total return matters more than current income. Income can be generated by liquidating small amounts of funds expected to underperform.
Apparently hordes of retail investors are out there just looking at the “dividend yield” number and using that as a basis for investment, which it should only be used to determine how effective management is at allocating capital. For example, if you have a debt-laden company that continues to give out distributions far beyond cash flow generation, it is probably a good sign you shouldn’t be investing in that company.
Investors in many income trusts that went public during the 2006 income trust mania learned this lesson.
(Addenda: I wonder how long it will be before you have “experts” trying to get retail investors to sell covered calls on their equity portfolios for additional income.)