Torsten Asmus
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Editor’s Note: This is the transcript version of the previously recorded show. Due to time and audio constraints, transcription may not be perfect. We encourage you to listen to the podcast embedded above or on the go via Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Check out High Dividend Opportunities Here! This episode was recorded on February 6th, 2023. |
Transcript
Daniel Snyder: Welcome back to Investing Experts Podcast. I’m Daniel Snyder. In this episode, we have Scott Kaufman from High Dividend Opportunities. I’m telling you this is a real treat.
We’re talking about exclusive insights from the #1 subscribed to Marketplace Service on Seeking Alpha. We get their outlook for the year, how they’re helping investors find quality income right now, and get the brand-new exclusive view on the (NYSEARCA:JEPI) ETF that has been taking over headlines with its double-digit yield and $20 billion in assets under management.
But first, just a reminder, anything you hear on this podcast should not be considered investment advice, at times myself or the guest my own positions in the securities mention. But this is for entertainment purposes only. You should seek advice from a licensed professional before investing.
And a big shout out to our listener who just gave us a five star review on Apple Podcasts. If you’re enjoying these episodes, please do us a favor and leave a rating, review or both on your favorite podcasting app. It’s helping us climb the charts and lets us continue to bring you these experts’ insights every week.
Now let’s get into the interview. All right. I have the pleasure of being joined right now by Scott Kaufman. Scott, how are you doing?
Scott Kaufman: I’m doing good. How are you?
Daniel Snyder: Doing well. I’m glad we finally get you on the podcast. I know it’s been a little while since we last spoke. We’ve done content on Seeking Alpha with you before. But for the people that don’t know who you are, we always like to kick off with a little one to three-minute kind of rundown.
So give us a little bit of a background of how you got started in investing the service that you’re a part of with High Dividend Opportunities? What the team has going on there? Just give us the full picture.
Scott Kaufman: Sure. So I’m started getting involved in investing when I was working in Regions Bank, started working there right out of college and getting involved and just kind of all the backgrounds of what’s going on with banking. I was very lucky to really work just right down the hall from a bunch of the high-net-worth private management investor, like folks there that run that aspect of things for Regions.
And it was really interesting getting to know them and hearing what they would sell or tell their clients versus what they were investing in themselves. There was like a real dichotomy between what the bank was allowing them to guide people into the 4% rule, the growth stocks, the passive ETF investing. And then almost without a fail, all of those guys that were in there and girls and ladies, too, were dividend investors. They were not following anything that they were selling.
And when I asked them, why, why was there this side versus this side? And they said, “Well, the banks in-between.” The Regions is telling us we’ve got to follow what is the common advice in the market because one, liability issues; and two, that’s kind of what people are expecting to hear.
And so they really took me under ring at first and kind of showed me a lot of what they were thinking and gave me a good foundation to start growing on my own thought process. I started writing on Seeking Alpha and got hooked up into High Dividend Opportunities with Rida, almost five years ago now. And so HDO has been on Seeking Alpha, we’re starting our eighth year.
So it’s been – I’ve been there longer with Rida and the rest of the teams and HDO has existed without us. So at this point, there’s me, there’s Rida Morwa, and there’s William Barton, and we’re the three managing members of HDO. We’re the kind of the head of the team. And then we have about four others that work with us as well, that right frequent content that kind of help with the team. We all work together and decide what’s going on in the model portfolio. And it’s really helped us grow.
We’re the largest marketplace at this point. There’s over 6,100 members in HDO and we’re growing in a rapid clip. So it’s really exciting because that just means chat is a place where you ask a question and you’re going to get five people’s answers from their walks of life and experience that help you have that multitude of counselors to know what the right choice.
Daniel Snyder: I love the way you kick started that off, if I can just say that. Like, talking about the bank experience and where people, I mean, we have a lot of very smart investors on Seeking Alpha as we all know. And then it’s just like, everybody knows that the banks are pitching their own thing, brokers are worried about their things. So we’re just like, there’s thousands and thousands of stocks out there in the market. And I love the approach that you guys take within high dividend where it’s just like, let’s find the ones that actually matter, right?
Let’s, like, not just push whatever everybody else is talking about right growth sector. And you have this own lane that you stick to and you’re like, we’re going to do this very well and you can do it very well. So let me ask you returns on HDO. What are the returns look like for people, so that they know?
Scott Kaufman: So the – we target at 9% to 10% yield on our portfolio. So right now, our portfolio is yielding just above 9%, which means if you were to put a 100,000 in there now, you’d expect to have about $90,000 worth of income. We do are a little bit more volatile than the overall market. Although last year, our price return was only down about 8% versus the market being down in double digits, so we were able to maintain that value largely because we’re seeing value stocks and that value sector of the market hold up better than that growth or those things which really have overwhelmingly taken over the indexes.
And so what we’re seeing is that as people worry about inflation, people worry about interest rates, that companies that have low debt and lots of cash coming in are more attractive. Because at this point, it’s starting to become more of like a savers market, same thing with CD rates or mortgage rates. You’re incentivized to save, non-incentivized to spend.
And so companies that have been doing that all along are being rewarded with better values. And we’re seeing our portfolio hold up better than the market and start to outperform the market as far as positive growth into this year.
Daniel Snyder: So you’re telling me you have this incredible yield and that you have a group of people working at High Dividend Opportunities. You guys must have a killer 2023 outlook. So what is it?
Scott Kaufman: Sure. So we present weekly market outlooks to our members. We really feel that the way that you should invest in the market is 50% focused on the here and now, and then keeping 50% of your eye on to the horizon. There’s a classic saying if you’re farming that when you’re plowing a field, you got to look at the end of the field. You can’t look right at your feet. You can’t look off to the sides. Otherwise, you won’t plow a straight line.
And so how we really look at our market outlook is we want to make small adjustments early to keep our portfolio on track, we would not have to try and guess around or trade around what else is going in the market or sentiment or things like that. We really want our portfolio to be agnostic. Meaning that whenever it comes, we’re going to keep getting our income and keep getting our money.
So as we look forward and we project outwards, we do see this is the recession that everybody is so focused on coming. We see it coming probably mid to late this year, if not early next year. And then with that, we see interest rates climbing a little bit more and then holding flat through most of 2024, with potentially some cuts going down into 2024 and 2025.
If you really look at, like, what banks are offering their clients, a lot of banks are offering high CD rates for one year and then come year two, year three, year four, year five, they’re offering 2% lower than what they’re offering in the one year, which means even banks at this point are saying, hey, “We’ll take your money now, give you good interest for a year, but we don’t think your money is worth that much, two, three, four years down the line. After the recession, we can get it cheaper from you then.
And so what we’re looking at is we’re seeing the factors come out and all of the backwards looking courses say that things look great because they’re looking backwards. One thing that a lot of people had buzz about. If you watch the financial and the user had everybody talking about the economy, and then they’re always going, what jobs, about the job report, about the job report. And the job report was great, except that the only reason it was really great looking was that experts guessed wrong.
And so instead of saying, “Hey, the experts were wrong, they said, hey, the economy is doing way better than we thought.” But if we look at the historical cycle of jobs before a recession and then jobs once a recession hits, unemployment is typically at record lows and jobs are at record highs right before a recession has. Because it’s not a canary in the coal mine, you’re not expecting jobs to start to cater.
Before the recession, people don’t start losing their jobs until the recession comes. And then at that point, we have a sudden spike in unemployment because People are suddenly worried about their pocketbooks and they’re not spending money. The companies that rely on people that spend money don’t cut jobs until they stop getting the income to cut. They need to cut the jobs and then it just becomes a cycle and hit a recession.
And so the job report, in our opinion, was really this backwards looking item that shows a typical pattern that we get right before recession where jobs are high, unemployment is low, and it’s really more of well, maybe we need to take this into effect consideration. If you look at the cycle, if you pull up the Fed data on job reports and inflate in sessions, every time before there’s a recession, we are sitting at near record unemployment. And then out of the blue, boom, people start losing their jobs once we’re in the recession not before.
Daniel Snyder: That’s a great point. So I imagine you guys have a fantastic game plan set up on how you’re going to handle that this year. When it comes to, I mean, maybe you’re investing in certain sectors right now and you’re going to rotate into others later on, what, is this a first-half, second-half, or are you taking it by quarters? How are you guys approaching this with your rotation?
Scott Kaufman: So with us having a largely agnostic portfolio, we really try to focus a few years down the line of what is going – where we should be positioned for then and kind of turn that ship with having 6,100 members. You can imagine that if we were to try to make a sudden change, you could really caught a lot of issues as far as, like, rocking different stocks in the market, especially since you’re often involved in smaller to mid-cap stocks to find those ones that are earning those yields.
And so we kind of take it more of like the cruise ship approach versus the jet ski. We’re not jumping back and forth over the waves, we are taking a slower approach to turn pre – before rate started being high, we started really pushing and encouraging our members to be involved in the fixed income that had a floating rate because they were on attractive to most people. They were selling at big discounts because the rates were so low. And then as rates are starting to hike, those fixed – those floating rate into investments start to look more and more attractive.
But now, we’re kind of at the other side of the scale, where if you’re looking to buy fixed income, you really shouldn’t be looking at a floating rate investment because most of those are going to start dropping when rates drop in a couple of years. And I want my income to stay stable now and in a couple of years.
So right now, one place that people really would be benefiting to look at is fixed rate, fixed income investments preferreds that have a set in stone, stable rate, things like the Crestwood Equity Partners preferred is the (CEQP) or CEQP.PR. It is just a set fixed rate. It does issue a K-1 at tax time, but it is a set fixed rate, and it’s an attractive rate, and it’s not going to change. And the company is doing awesome if they’re covering that dividend without a problem.
You could also look towards things like the two Harvard series C preferred. Again, another set fixed rate preferred that’s selling at a discount department. Something that you can go out and you can buy and then just expect it to continue to do well. The other thing is that these fixed rate preferreds when interest rates climb, those fixed rate preferreds drop in value. They start trading towards a discount to par because the only way to adjust the yield on them is you can’t change it because it’s fixed, so the price has to change.
And so a lot of – we’re seeing a lot of fixed rate preferred selling at large discounts, even banking preferred that are in the – their par yield is 3% or even 4% that they’re trading in the teens because people were like, hey, 4% is not attractive. When I can go and get a CD for 5% in interest, and your inflation is at 8%, this 4% is not going to cut it.
But now the market is pricing them around 6% and you can buy it here at an $18, $17, $15 price. And when interest rates start to fall, those are going to climb right back towards par. And you can get some income, but also then lock in a bunch of capital gains as well. So that’s really one area that we’re encouraging people to focus on is fixed rate, fixed income debt versus floating rate, which now looks attractive because you have all these floating rate funds that are raising their dividends that are just going to have to cut them when insurance rates go back down.
Daniel Snyder: Yeah. You don’t want to buy after everybody else’s bought, right? So I think it’s pretty interesting, right? You’re talking about the fixed income, fixed rate. What’s the timeline into the future on that? Are you talking two years, five years, longer?
Scott Kaufman: So when we find something that we like to hold, our goal is to hold it forever, right? We typically when we – when we issue something that we want to buy for members, we tell them we aim for a two-and-a-half to two-year time frame. We want to hold this for at least that time frame. The goal then is that we’re not trying to gain the market in the short-term, right?
We want to have something that when the market goes up, when the market goes down, when the market goes sideways, that we’re happy at holding, we’re happy to have the income pouring in from, which sometimes then leads us to have some comments or some confusion in the general public when we invest on something. And six months down the line, it’s down 10%. People like, “Hey, this is a terrible trade.” And we’re like, whoa pump them breaks. We still got another two years that we’re looking to hold this thing that is going to play out for us.
And so with these fixed rate income, I mean, if you can get a banking preferred at 6% and it’s trading at in the teens, and it goes back up to 25 – par 25 and you still like that 6% and you can live on that and you don’t think Bank of America (BAC) is going to go under anytime soon. You could ideally hold that for a lifetime, right? That really qualifies into that whole widows, an orphan-type investment where you can set up a widow with that. She’s not going to have to worry about trading in and can gather the income forever.
Although if you want it to be more of a trading kind of investor, when rates start to fall in late 2024, 2025 time frame and start hanging back towards the 3% range, those investments are going to increase in value, and you could trade out for capital gains at that point if you wanted to that row, take to something else that yields better.
Daniel Snyder: I like that game plan. So let me ask you though outside of, I mean, you were talking about financials, right? Are there other sectors within this market right now that you guys are kind of eyeing in regards to what you might believe is a fixed yield for the future?
Scott Kaufman: Yeah. Another good place to look to really is, like, utilities or other really essential infrastructure, right? When you have your recent recession, people are still going to be paying their power bills. They’re still going to have to pay for their water. They’re still going to have to go buy gasoline. And so we still have a very big focus on those sectors.
We largely will use closed end funds to invest in the utility sector or infrastructure sectors, mainly because all those companies have low yields, but they’re also variable, liable, and steady growers. Like the Reaves Utility Income Fund is a great CEF; ticker is (UTG). It has never cut its dividend. It’s actually only grown it, and its NAV has continued to grow as well, partially because they’re forced to pay out 90% of what they bring in, their leverage is cheaper than what you and I could get ourselves. And they’re holding a whole bunch of utilities, a basket of really strong names that continue to grow their dividend.
And so we can let the utility fund CF managers kind of trade in and out between the utilities they think are best while we continue to get that income. Cohen & Steers has an awesome Infrastructure Fund, or (UTF), that pays really strongly as well, and both of those pay monthly dividends. And so you can set it up, buy those just kind of just let those ride And through the good times and the bad times, they’re going to continue to pay you strongly.
Other things like that, they kind of fall into that category of wanting to own the toll booths and not the concert hall per se is the famous thing is things like into your midstreams or energized product partners that move the things that we all rely on. And so they pay really good dividends and they – they’re either growing or paying a good high yield that’s fixed, and we can enjoy those as well.
Really, the idea here is we want to look at not who makes money off of the buying and selling of products, but who makes money moving it or the land that it comes from like, REITs are really good as well. Who makes the money in the background versus who relies on the consumer to make that money?
Daniel Snyder: Scott, let me ask you. We’re talking about dividends and finding yield within what your service does over on Seeking Alpha. I think a lot of people get caught up within the dividend kings, dividend aristocrats, and that’s where they should park money if they don’t really know where to look for, whether it’s funds or anything else.
So what should investors know right now about all those companies that have a track record that’s proven of growing their dividend and paying out their dividend? I mean, I think most retail investors might just go, oh, I need to go buy these companies because they’ve been around forever. And you’re saying no focus on utilities. So what’s the thought here?
Scott Kaufman: So one thing that is really popular with these dividend or risk grants or dividend kings, with these 50, 25-year payout histories of growing dividends. What a lot of people have is as a recency bias. They forget the last time we had a great financial crisis, right? With the last major recession, it caused a lot of issues in the banking realm. No recession really hits the same sector twice. And what they seem to forget was when you walked into that recession, you had a set number of dividend aristocrats. four years after that recession, over 50% of that list was gone.
So if you were on that list and living on this 3% to 4% yield because you’re paying a premium because those names have that long dividend history of growth, and those names often aren’t raising their dividend by much. I mean, if you’ve got a 4% yield and you hike it 5%, you’re really not giving that much income even though it might feel like it versus someone who’s got like a 8% or 9% yield and they get a 1% raise. Ratio-wise, you’re really not gaining that much more income.
And then you come out the other side of one of these recessions and your dividend is cut, your dividend is reduced, your dividend is gone because you trusted basically just on the history. A lot of people got a rough wake-up call through the great financial crisis where they just lost dividend income because they relied on these so-called great names that looked great. Because looking backwards, but didn’t have the sustainability going through.
I can kind of think of, like, the Kraft Heinz (KHC) situation, where they had a low yield, they had a great dividend history, and then they hit raw water. And the first thing they did was they just cut their dividend and all sorts. And then what happens to that is everyone who bought it for income, sells out, and now you have a lower dividend and you’ve got capital losses on top of it.
And so simply buying the dividend or risk grants or dividend kings and staying there and paying that premium because of the name value, it sounds great, but often it doesn’t always work out as a strong strategy because when a recession hits, a lot of them fall off that list.
Daniel Snyder: That’s a great point. Let’s switch back to the fun side of things So in the intro, I mentioned we’re going to have this conversation about (JEPI), J-E-P-I, the ETF. It’s taken the world by storm. I believe it’s JPMorgan, isn’t it, that put this together?
Scott Kaufman: Yes. Yep.
Daniel Snyder: JPMorgan, they have $20 billion assets under management. The yield is double digits at 11.75%. You’re paying the dividend monthly. What should investors know about this ETF? Is it something that you would recommend? Or is there a red flag that we don’t know about?
Scott Kaufman: Sure. So we get a lot of questions about, JEPI. As you can imagine, being the largest income focused and high-yield focused marketplace, we get questions all the time about JEPI. And overwhelmingly, our answer has been to avoid it. We actually – we’re not interested in JEPI. We completely pass over JEPI. And there’s a few reasons why.
The biggest thing is how we view the market, right? Historically, the market climbs. There is times when the market dips or falls down. But historically, looking over the long-term trend of the market, the market is going upwards. And so, JEPI, they are focused on what’s called an equity-linked note. Basically, it’s a mixture of a fixed income asset where it has a fixed return; and then a cap upside, where if the market climbs 7% and you’ve got to 50% inclusion in that, you’re only going to go up 3.5%. You don’t get the full upside.
But the nice thing is you have some caps downside. The issue there is that when the market overwhelmingly climbs, something like JEPI does not come along with the recovery because of that cap. And so looking at the last year with the market falling, JEPI looks really great because it’s not falling as much of the market it is still falling, but it’s not falling as much of the market. It’s paying us great yield, which is double digits looking backwards.
But more likely this year, if you were to recheck it forward since it’s a variable dividend, you really be able to rely more immediately assuming it has a 6% to 8% forward yield now looking backwards where it’s outperforming, while its value still falling. And then the issue here is that these funds attract a lot of attention.
As we can see, JPMorgan (JPM) is getting tons of management fees from this. What happens to these funds? None of them are long lived. If you look around for an equity-linked-based funds like this, that has a long history, you’re not going to see one. And if you look all over the market, you’re just not going to find, one of the reason is, is they fall in value with the market, but they don’t recover alongside.
So they never get their legs to climb back up as well. And once they fall far enough, JPMorgan is just going to wrap it up. Say goodbye. They’re going to mint out of – mint a fresh new ETF from the same strategy, get a whole bunch of new investors and repeat the process. And so in reality, these funds do better when the market is sideways trending because of the idea of almost like a covered call.
If you have a covered call option, you’re saying, “Hey, you can force me to sell it to you at this value. And if the market comes above that, you’ve got that small cap upside. And then either you’ve got a rebuy at a higher price and now you’ve lost something or you’re just missing out on that asset. And so, JEPI looks good. When the market is falling, which it did, it outperformed a lot of things when the market was falling. But when the market starts to climb, it just doesn’t keep up.
And so in that essence, with our outlook that the market historically claims more than it falls, you’re basically saying, “Hey, I don’t want to participate in the majority of what the market is going to do.”
Daniel Snyder: I’m looking here at the symbol page on Seeking Alpha, and it shows that back in January of 2022, right, when the market peaked, JEPI, which is just I don’t think we mentioned it to you guys, it’s the JPMorgan Equity Premium Income ETF is the full name for anybody that wants to look at it. It was trading at about $62 a share. And today, Monday, February 6 while we’re recording this, it’s down to $54 a share still, as you mentioned, showing that past historical yield of 11.75%, but anybody looking at this chart can obviously see it’s in a down trend line, the volume has been increasing. Do you think this is people kind of rotating out of it more than in it?
Scott Kaufman: I think as more people get worried about the downtrend potential of the market and looking forward, we’re going to see more inflows to JEPI than outflows simply because it’s being held as a, hey, large double-digit yield covered investment without people really fully understanding potentially what is going on in the background and that capped upside. I just pulled it up here myself looking at it and we have an article that’s going to – that came out, it’s going to come out Wednesday. So when this recording goes live, it’ll have been yesterday.
Just comparing JEPI to our preferred fund over JEPI for, like, a market-wide income ETF. And, like, when the market climbed looking all the way back into around 2021, when the market climbed about 65%, JEPI only climbed 44%. And so we see that there’s, like, that 20% failure to keep up. And if the market starts has a recovery after a recession, JEPI is just not going to be there.
And so you maybe worth holding as we look towards a recession. And as we start to fall into a recession, it’s going to fall, but not as much. But then if you’re thinking that a recovery is coming, you’re going to want to jump ship and find something that’s better for the long run. And really, with our viewpoint of wanting to hold things for at least 2.5 years, I see a recovery on the other side within that time frame. So that JEPI is not something that I’m going to want to have to babysitter worry about. I’d rather hold a fund that’s going to recover with the market and still outperform at income-wise while it’s falling.
Daniel Snyder: I’m looking here at Seeking Alpha authors, historically, seven of them have a buy on this, three have a hold, and then you guys are coming in saying, avoid it. I mean, that’s a big income, right? That’s 12% yield. Do you – would you say within high dividend opportunities, you guys have easily a couple of other selections that can provide that 10% to 12% yield that somebody might be looking for right now.
Scott Kaufman: Definitely. Yeah. We have multiple names that trade in the double-digit range. Looking at that yield going price. And the thing I’ll have to mention again is with JEPI, that double-digit is a trailing 12 months. So you’re looking at what it paid in the last 12 months versus its current price now.
JEPI’s dividends are variable every month. And so someone shouldn’t buy it expecting that they’re going to get that 12%. If you look at it, they’re – at JEPI’ dividends, I mean, they’re all over the place. Some are higher, some are lower, it just kind of jumps up and down.
And so as the value of JEPI falls, the less they’re going to be able to afford of owning those equity linked notes, the less income they’re going to generate and the cycle is going to be – going to go on. And JEPI pays more when the market recovers in some ways than when it falls.
If you look at, like, back again, like, in that ‘21 – that 2021 timeframe, they had some really good dividends. And then through 2021, their dividend was kind of small most of the months, and then it started to climb again when we started getting into 2022, partially because that yield versus dividend was getting better, looking backwards, because the price was falling. If your price is smaller and your dividend in the last 12 months is bigger, you’re going to get larger yields.
So we have plenty of things that really yield. I mean, you could buy some fixed income that that yield 7%, 8%, 9%, 10%, that’s going to pay you that regardless of what the market does as long as the company issuing it is stable, that you don’t have to worry about this variability in its dividend.
In a lot of income investors, if they’re investing for their retirement, their bills are going to go up. You don’t want an investment that’s going to have your income be unreliable for the predictivness of what’s going on. We hold some funds that pay variable dividends, and we kind of have this, and you’ll expect to have yield and then anything above that is kind of like a surprise bonus because we want a dividend payment level that is reliable.
And with JEPI, I mean, if you look at that dividend, it’s just up and down and up and down based on what they can get for their equity-linked notes. It’s not – I mean, we can come back a year from now and look at it, but I doubt it’s going to have paid from today’s price until next year that’s going to have paid double digits. It’s going to have – it’s going to pay closer to that 7% to 8% range. And if I’m wrong, that’s fine. But it it’s not something where you can look at the last 12 months and really reliably to term in what its yield is going to be looking forward.
Daniel Snyder: Scott, analogy to that. When we’re doing the outlook for 2024, we’re going to get you back on…
Scott Kaufman: Sure.
Daniel Snyder: …we’re going to revisit JEPI, see what’s going on here. Because, I mean, I’m looking at some of the top 10 holdings here. I mean, obviously, the biggest holding is JPMorgan’s U.S. government money market, but then you got – you got ExxonMobil (XOM), you got MasterCard (MA) and Visa (V), Comcast (CMCSA), Hershey (HSY), Abbvie (ABBV), Bristol Myers (BMY), I mean, you’re talking about these companies where it’s just kind of like, I mean, yeah, they’re getting the dividend and any capital appreciation there.
If they do any rotations, I think their expense ratio on this ETF is 0.35%. And as you mentioned, they’re selling options to try to bring in that extra income, the derivatives, and I can’t wait to see what happens because I at team, Scott, I am team, HDO. You guys absolutely crush it. But at the same time, I mean, this ETF has just gotten so much buzz. So I definitely want to revisit it here in a year with you.
But before we get on out of here, we’ve been taking up too much your time and your knowledge. Where can people find you? Where can they ask you questions? Give us the rundown of how to contact Scott Kaufman?
Scott Kaufman: Sure. So I’m under the moniker of Treading Softly on Seeking Alpha that’s been the name that I had before I joined HDO and really kind of got into the fun. The easiest way to get a hold of me and all honesty is the HDO chat. If you’re an HDO member, they know how to get a hold of me. I’m in there all the time. I have – I’m often Co-Author with Rida on a lot of our articles that come out to the public. I think almost five out of six articles a week. I have either help right or help edit that I’m on there with them. And so the easiest way is you can just find me through that method.
HDO is really easy to join any single read a more article that comes out. There’s going to be a link that’s available to that. We also have a newsletter offering as well. That is a stripped down version of HDO’s called HDO Lite, you get half of our market outlooks. And so instead of getting one every week, you get one every other week, we also have a smaller group of picks. There’s only about five picks in there versus the over a 100 in our HDO model portfolio, and everything has our returns tracked.
If you join HDO today, you can actually go through our model portfolio. We have a tab that has all of our old sold securities when we bought them, when we sold them, what our return was, and you can just look over how we’ve done for the last seven years. We’re in our eighth year now of running as a marketed place. And we have that whole, you can see it. And you can decide in your two-week free trial whether or not this is going to be for you or not.
And you can also – we have new people all the time come in and they ask our members, “Hey, how is your experience?” And members are going to be brutally honest. They’re going to tell you whether they love it or they hate it. And, thankfully, the most important member first love it. We have a massive number of numbers that have been with us from the start. And we really appreciate all of them and just how they help each other. But the easiest way to get all of us is really showing any one of our articles, just comment, and we are always on top of replying to comments.
Daniel Snyder: You’re mentioning about the newsletter and the service and everything. Are you guys running any discounts right now?
Scott Kaufman: Yeah. So right now, new members signing up for HDO on an annual plan can, for their first year only, get 30% off. So 30% off that first year, get your feet wet, get your feet go and get yourself going, and then it’s full price after that.
For the newsletter, we also have a discount going on right now as well. It’s about 50% off for the newsletter. Again, there’s no trial for the newsletter. If you sign up for it, you just pay for it right out of the gate.
The nice thing though with the newsletter, too, is if you’re like, I’m not sure I want to pay full HDO. Let me get a taste of it. Newsletter is more an expensive option. But what Seeking Alpha allows you to do is if, let’s say, you’re in your first month as a newsletter service and you’re like, man, I really want the full age to experience. I really want to wake up and have a burning question and ask 6,000 other investors and see if they can give me an answer, Seeking Alpha will allow you to roll what you haven’t used from your newsletter membership against the price of a full HDO membership.
So reviewing after a month of the newsletter, decide you want to pay for the full HDO. You’re not losing the money that you pay towards the newsletter. They just take one, 12 off of what you’ve paid and the other 11, 12th to go into your HDO membership price. And we do see a good number of people who first sign up for the newsletter within a couple of months or, like I love these market outlooks, but I want all four. I don’t want two out of the four, and they roll right up into the full HDO and get typed in.
So – but, yes, we do have both of them are on a discounted price right now to help people kind of with the whole idea of a recession coming. We want them to save money. So join us. You’re going to earn enough dividends if you follow going along and that – you’ll be able to afford the full price without a problem next year.
Daniel Snyder: Scott, I can’t thank you enough for all your time today. And for everybody listening right now, we will make sure to get those links within the show notes page over on Seeking Alpha. Just head to seekingalpha.com, type in Investing Experts Podcast, you’ll find every show notes page from every podcast episode and every single episode we’ve done with all of our amazing guests.
Scott, anything you want to say before we get on out of here?
Scott Kaufman: No. I just appreciate you having me. I look forward to you comparing how JEPI did this year when we get back to you doing the 2023 outlook.
Daniel Snyder: Just a reminder, everyone, if you enjoyed this episode, leave a rating or a review on your favorite podcasting app. And we’ll see you again next week with a new episode and a new guest.
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