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Please remember, I very rarely post the current shares in the SNOWBALL as it’s better if you make your own trading decisions, just in case I buy a clunker.
All buys and sells are posted as soon as they are traded, so with a bit of DYOR, the current SNOWBALL portfolio is researchable from the search button above.
Even if you have a modest Snowball, remember that compound interest take a couple of years of re-investing to make a noticeable difference, so the sooner you start the sooner you will finish.
I’ve sold NESF for a total loss of £1,193.00. The SNOWBALL has earned over 3k of dividends, which have been re-invested in the SNOWBALL, so the transaction is about level. The earned re-invested dividends will continue to earn dividends, so the actual transaction will print a profit in time.
NextEnergy Solar Fund, a specialist investor in solar energy and energy storage, is pleased to announce its second interim dividend of 1.39p per Ordinary Share in respect of the quarter ended 30 September 2026.
As previously announced, the Company’s dividend policy is to distribute 75% of operating cash flows as dividends to Ordinary Shareholders. The Board confirms that the second interim dividend has been declared in accordance with this policy.
The level of the second interim dividend reflects the seasonal generation profile of the Company’s solar portfolio, with electricity production and associated cash generation typically weighted towards the summer months. As a result, dividend payments may vary between quarters and are not expected to be evenly distributed throughout the financial year.
The second interim dividend of 1.39p per Ordinary Share will be paid on 31 December 2026 to Ordinary Shareholders on the register as at the close of business on 13 November 2026. The ex-dividend date is 12 November 2026.
I’ve bought for the SNOWBALL an opening position in BRAI.
347 shares for 1k.
Yielding 6% based on it’s NAV, so the amount of dividends received will fall when the NAV falls. Only an opening position as the price is near to it’s high and is likely to fall, when is the known unknown.
Currently trading at a small premium to NAV
The Board of BlackRock American Income Trust plc is pleased to announce the fourth quarterly interim dividend in respect of the financial year ended 31 October 2026 of 4.22 pence per ordinary share. The dividend is payable on 11 December 2026to holders of ordinary shares on the register at the close of business on 13 November 2026 (ex-dividend date is 12 November 2026). The quarterly dividend has been calculated based on 1.5% of the Company’s NAV at close of business on 30 October 2026 (being the last business day of the calendar quarter) which was 281.19 pence per ordinary share
I’ve bought for the SNOWBALL 14743 shares in ORIT.
Yielding 10.1% and trading at discount to NAV of 29%.
The Board of Octopus Renewables Infrastructure Trust plc is pleased to declare an interim dividend in respect of the period from 1 July 2026 to 30 September 2026 of 1.56 pence per Ordinary Share, payable on 30 November 2026 to shareholders on the register as at 13 November 2026 (the “Q3 2026 Dividend”). The ex-dividend date will be 12 November 2026.
The Q3 2026 Dividend is in line with the Company’s target for the financial year from 1 January 2026 to 31 December 2026 (“FY 2026”) of 6.23 pence per Ordinary Shar
Each branch of the Monkey Puzzle, is one year’s growth, exactly the same as the income in your Snowball.
The current dividend income fcast is £14,040, although receipt of some of the cash may slip into 2027.
If you compare the figure to the plan you will note, we will have completed the plan seven years early.
Next year the SNOWBALL will try to equal the 2033 figure and then it will be time for a new plan. If the SNOWBALL continues to grow at the same rate, not guaranteed though, in 5 years the income could be 26k and then in another 5 years 52k. This is not a target or a fcast.
The SNOWBALL has a small position is PCT which will be sold when in profit and the cash switched into BRAI.
As you can see from the chart it’s been a period of outperformance, so anyone buying now will most probably lose money, although it could still go higher before reversing.
The SNOWBALL will add free funds when available, so if the price falls it will be a plus. BRAI pays a dividend of 6% based on net asset, so the NAV falls so will the received dividend.
ANNOUNCEMENT OF QUARTERLY INTERIM DIVIDEND
2 November 2026
The Board of BlackRock American Income Trust plc is pleased to announce the fourth quarterly interim dividend in respect of the financial year ended 31 October 2026 of 4.22 pence per ordinary share. The dividend is payable on 11 December 2026to holders of ordinary shares on the register at the close of business on 13 November 2026 (ex-dividend date is 12 November 2026). The quarterly dividend has been calculated based on 1.5% of the Company’s NAV at close of business on 30 October 2026 (being the last business day of the calendar quarter) which was 281.19 pence per ordinary share.
Michael Foster, Investment Strategist Updated: October 26, 2026
We’ve got a very nice buy setup in 7%-paying closed-end funds (CEFs) in front of us. Few people realize it.
It stems from the fact that, while stocks have taken a breather after booking strong gains so far this year, many CEFs are lagging more than they should be. The cause? Overdone investor fear around, you guessed it, AI.
That dour mood has set up a particularly interesting dynamic in CEFs holding US stocks:
The chart above, from my CEF Insider service, shows that these funds’ average return based on their market prices (in green) is up about 7.2% so far this year. That’s okay, but it’s well behind their roughly 11% returns on net asset value, or NAV—the value of these funds’ underlying portfolios, in other words.
That gap has resulted in attractive discounts to NAV among these funds. The silly thing is that investors should at least be bidding equity CEFs up in line with their portfolios.
As we’ve discussed recently, corporate earnings and revenue are up sharply and are expected to keep rising. Equity CEFs’ returns based on market price should reflect that—and a 7.2% return on the year just doesn’t cut it.
4 Popular (for CEFs!) Equity Funds, Ranked
The thing to bear in mind is that not all discounted equity CEFs are attractive, and some of their discounts are well-deserved. It’s up to us to separate the contenders from the pretenders.
With that in mind, we’re going to examine four high-yield CEFs you may have heard of. All focus on equities and all sport high payouts. But only one is a buy.
They are the 23.7%-yielding (!) BlackRock ESG Capital Allocation Term Trust (ECAT); the 10.9%-paying Gabelli Utility Trust (GUT); the BlackRock Technology and Private Equity Term Trust (BTX), with a 7.3% yield; and the BlackRock Science and Technology Term Trust (BSTZ), which yields 7.1%.
These funds all have their specialties, but that’s not what we’re going to focus on here. Instead, we’ll base our analysis on the recent movements of their discounts to NAV:
GUT’s Shocking Premium
I’m going to start with GUT (in green above) because it’s the obvious standout here, with a sky-high 96.4% premium to NAV.
GUT is a utility fund that holds some of the biggest power generators in the US, including NextEra Energy (NEE), Duke Energy (DUK) and Wisconsin-based WEC Energy Group (WEC).
Income investors (me included) love utilities. They are, after all, a lower-risk way to generate income and potential upside. But we don’t love them so much that we’d pay nearly $2 for every $1 of assets! But that’s what anyone who buys GUT now is essentially doing.
So our first elimination is an easy call: Dramatically overpriced GUT is out.
That leaves ECAT, BTX and BSTZ. Two of these—BTX and BSTZ—are highly tech-focused, as their names suggest. If you’re worried about tech because it’s been falling faster than other sectors, I’d urge you to reconsider. Because historically, tech pullbacks have more often than not been buying opportunities.
But even if you want to buy ECAT to avoid tech, I’d still say you’re out of luck. For one, its top-three stock holdings are NVIDIA (NVDA), Alphabet (GOOGL) and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSM). So even though ECAT doesn’t have tech in its name, it’s still a tech-heavy fund.
There is another concern here: ECAT’s absurdly high 23.7% yield is quite simply unsustainable. The fund’s 9% annualized total return since its IPO is far short of the profit needed to maintain payouts.
One reason why that return is likely to stay low is the fund’s ESG mandate, which requires that 80% of its assets be in assets that fit the fund’s environmental, social and governance requirements. Politics aside, this requires an extra level of research and oversight that is not free, and those costs weigh on returns.
More worrying, ESG has been falling out of favor even among investors politically aligned with ESG goals, which is likely going to drag demand on the fund and keep its discount from closing.
These aren’t the only reasons ECAT has relatively weak portfolio returns, though.
Tech “Latecomer” ECAT Lags the Pack
If we look at the last year’s total NAV return for each fund, we see a problem with ECAT (in blue above): Its fundamentals are weak compared to those of BTX (in orange) and BSTZ (in purple). This is a concern with ECAT: It has been pivoting to tech recently, to follow the trend, and it’s done that only after the trend was apparent.
This isn’t the biggest red flag, because sometimes an asset manager dips into an opportunity slowly, out of caution. But the CEF market can punish that slow action by giving the fund a bigger discount.
BTX’s Discount Widens. It’s Still Not Cheap Enough
This should have happened naturally with ECAT, as equity CEFs’ NAV returns outpaced their returns based on market price. And it did—but only to a point. The blue line in the chart above shows that this fund traded at a slight premium a little over a month ago, and that premium has now evaporated, with a steep drop to a 6% discount.
But that discount is still less generous than those of BSTZ (in purple) and BTX (in orange). This suggests the market hasn’t fully priced in ECAT’s weaker fundamentals, setting up the risk of its discount widening in the coming weeks and months.
So ECAT is out.
If we look just at the BTX and BSTZ discounts above, something else becomes clear: They look like they’re stabilizing, and perhaps shifting back to narrowing, with a 9.6% discount for BSTZ and 11.3% for BTX—narrower than they were just a few days ago.
So which one are we picking here? Ultimately, the one whose discount has greater momentum.
In the case of BSTZ, its current discount is around where it was at the start of the year. That’s not bad, but we want to buy discounts that are still wide but boast momentum.
And that’s where BTX wins. Its current 11.3% discount is still attractive, and it’s heading the right way: much narrower than the 15.5% at which it started the year. That suggests the discount could keep narrowing as this latest round of tech panic fades, putting upward pressure on BTX’s share price.
