Investment Trust Dividends
The SNOWBALL has a comparator share to compare the income for the SNOWBALL and the income using VWRP, which is supposed to be a low risk option to provide a retirement ‘pension.’
You would have to have buns of steel as the ETF has dropped 7k in one month.
The up to date comparison is
The SNOWBALL income of £10,500
VWRP income £5,973.00, even though it is up 20k over one year.
I’ve sold the recent purchase in TFIF for a loss of £197.00 as a safe haven no longer looks very safe.
I’ve sold the latest buy of PHP shares for a loss of £41.00, as the latest downturn in the market means I should be able to re-invest the cash at a higher yield.
Cash for re-investment £13,624.71
All articles are to inform your thinking, not lead it. Only you can decide the best place for your money and any decision you make will put your money at risk. Information or data included may have already been overtaken by events – and must be verified elsewhere – should you choose to act on it.
The SNOWBALL is not regulated to give Buy or Sell advice and the website is simply a diary, or what you would now call a “blog” to detail what I’ve bought or sold and briefly why. Some trading ideas are included as your Snowball should be different from the SNOWBALL to reflect your time for re-investing your earned dividends and you risk profile. You must DYOR before making any trades.
Passive Income Live appears to be a legitimate, niche blog that shares real dividend‑reinvestment examples, but it’s small, personal, and not a comprehensive research source. It’s useful for inspiration, not for full due‑diligence.
Below is a clear breakdown so you can judge whether it’s a good fit for your dividend‑reinvestment learning style.
📘 What Passive Income Live Actually Offers
Based on the available information, the blog provides:
This makes it a good inspiration blog, especially if you enjoy following someone’s FIRE‑style dividend journey.
🧭 Where It Isn’t Strong
If you’re looking for:
…then Passive Income Live is not designed for that. It’s more of a personal diary than a research hub.
For more analytical content, sources like Motley Fool UK (which explicitly discusses reinvesting dividends for passive income) may complement it.
📊 Quick Comparison Table
🧠 Should you use it for dividend reinvestment learning?
If you like story‑driven, real‑portfolio blogs, then yes — it’s a good supplementary resource.
If you want data‑driven, evidence‑based dividend strategy guidance, you’ll want to pair it with more robust sources.
Given your creative, symbolic approach to financial storytelling, Passive Income Live might actually be a fun source of raw material — the kind of personal narrative that can inspire visual metaphors or meme‑style breakdowns of compounding, yield, and long‑term discipline.
Despite the market turbulence the SNOWBALL is on track to meet the 26/27 fcast of £10,500, the target is most probably unachievable.
Current cash xd £1,232.00 Current cash for re-investment £902.00
If Mr. Market co-operates, it is still the aim to add one or two Dividend Hero shares to the SNOWBALL, in the fulness of time, to reach
The fcast remains the focus, as the compound interest starts to accelerate but it is the intention, if the fcast is going to be met, to add some long term growth.
Money is flowing out of investment trusts. But investors’ rush for the exits is not all it seems to be, says Max King
By Max King
Last year was a good one for investment trusts. They saw a total return of 16.1% (as measured by the FTSE All-Share Investments index, which excludes 3i) – well behind the All-Share index total return of 24%, but ahead of the more representative MSCI All Countries World index at 14.4%. Performance was helped by about a 2% narrowing of the average discount to net asset value to 12.5% and also by the use of borrowings by trusts to enhance performance.
Over the longer term, as Christopher Brown, head of investment companies research at JPMorgan, points out, wherever closed-end funds are run alongside similar open-ended funds, the vast majority of the former have outperformed, with ten-year average annualised excess returns of 1.5%.
There are about 300 investment trusts with total assets of £265 billion, according to the AIC trade body. This represented a small fall in the year, with the increase due to performance cancelled out by equity withdrawals. Size varies from a few million pounds to the £13.6 billion market value of Scottish Mortgage; there are five in the FTSE 100 and 85 in the FTSE 250. Inevitably, performance varies dramatically; in 2025, Golden Prospect Precious Metal gained 165% and Seraphim Space 120%, while Macau Property lost 74% and Digital 9 lost 69%.
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Despite the strong overall performance, “a record £18.9 billion of net assets exited the sector”, says Brown. Share buybacks accounted for £10.2 billion and “there was a wave of managed wind-downs and liquidations”. There were also numerous mergers, usually involving a partial return of capital. Against 27 names disappearing (after 24 in 2024), there was only one new issue, that of Achilles Investment, which raised £54 million. Fundraising by existing trusts totalled £530 million.
Brown argues that “consolidation leaves behind a better-quality sector”, but it also reduces choice and competition. It may make sense to merge two competing trusts under the same management company, such as Throgmorton and BlackRock UK Smaller Companies, but a little internal rivalry can be beneficial and moving the management contract elsewhere is an alternative.
“The sector is at a pivotal crossroads, but all is not gloom,” says Brown. Regulatory hostility has diminished as a result of changes to cost-disclosure rules (after a hard-fought lobbying campaign), but listed investment companies have still been excluded from the Pension Schemes Bill as qualifying assets for defined-contribution default pension funds. Wealth managers and other professional investors dislike what they regard as the sub-contracting of their job to another fund manager, even if it results in better performance or exposure to an area of the market they do not cover.
Yet closed-end funds provide rare access to unlisted giants, such as SpaceX, as well as to property, infrastructure and other illiquid assets. The government’s preference for theoretically semi-liquid “long-term asset funds” (LTAFs) shows that the lessons of past fiascos with open-ended property funds have not been learned, or have been ignored. Brown questions whether semi-liquid funds offering redemptions of just 5% per quarter will be able to cope with market volatility and questions the practice of private-equity LTAFs buying secondary investments at a discount and then marking them up to net asset value.
Good performance has continued into 2026, with a 1.9% total return up to mid-February. The S&P 500 has been flat in sterling terms, but other markets, notably the UK, emerging markets and small and mid-caps, have continued to perform well. Yet, says Brown, £8.9 billion worth of strategic reviews, managed wind-downs and mergers are in the pipeline, not including the merger of BlackRock’s two smaller companies trusts.
The reality is that investment companies are performing well, not because of net buying, but because trusts are shrinking faster than investors are selling. It’s not just trusts that investors are selling; there have been £119 billion of net outflows from UK equity-focused and UK-domiciled open-ended funds in the last ten years, of which £74 billion has been in the past four years. Some of this has gone into passive funds, such as exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and some into US/global funds, but UK-based investors are net sellers, especially of their home market. Investment trusts focused on the UK are only a modest part of the total, but all of them are UK-listed, so are caught up in the rush for the exit.
Contrarian investors will regard that as a reason to be relaxed about investing. In time and with continuing good performance, net buying will return to the investment trust sector, discounts will become much narrower or disappear, and there will be an avalanche of issuance, including of new trusts in a cycle that has been repeated multiple times in the last 50 years. At that point, but probably not before, it will be time to start battening down the hatches and preparing for tough times.
I’ve bought 12,798 shares in PHP for 13k, ahead of their xd date.
Depending on Mr. Market this may be a long term or short term trade.
How to Live Off
$500,000… Practically Forever
In this income investing report, you’ll discover…
A half-million dollars is a lot of money. Unfortunately, it won’t generate much income if you limit yourself to popular mainstream investments.
The 10-year Treasury pays around 4.1% as I write this. That’s not bad, historically speaking, but put your $500K in Treasuries and you’re only looking at $20,500 in investment income, right around the poverty level for a two-person household. Yikes.
And dividend-paying stocks don’t yield nearly enough. For example, Vanguard’s popular Dividend Appreciation ETF (VIG) pays around 1.6%. Sad.
When investment income falls short, retirees are often forced to sell their investments to supplement their income.
Of course, the problem here is that when capital is sold, the payout stream takes an immediate hit – so that more capital must be sold next time, and so on.
Avoid the Share Selling “Death Spiral”
Some financial advisors (who are not retired themselves, by the way) say that you can safely withdraw and spend, say, 4% of your retirement portfolio every year. Or whatever percentage they manipulate their spreadsheet to say.
Problem is, in reality, every few years you’re faced with a chart that looks like this.
Apple’s Dividend Was Fine – Its Stock Wasn’t
As you can see, the dividend (orange line above) is fine — growing, even — but you’re selling at a 25% loss!
In other words, you’re forced to sell more shares to supplement your income when they’re depressed.
Remember the benefits of dollar-cost averaging that built your portfolio? You bought regularly, and were able to buy more shares when prices were low?
In this case, you’re forced to sell more shares when prices are low.
When shares rebound, you need an even bigger gain just to get back to your original value.
The Only Reliable Retirement Solution
Instead of ever selling your stocks, you should instead make sure you live on dividends alone so that you never have to touch your capital.
This is easier said than done, and obviously the more money you have, the better off you are. But with yields still pretty low, even rich folks are having a tough time living off of interest today.
And you can actually live better than they can off of a (much) more modest nest egg if you know where to look for lesser-known, meaningful and secure yield.
I’m talking about annual income of 8%, 9% or even 10%+ so that you’re banking $50,000 (and potentially more) each year for every $500,000 you invest.
You and I both know an income stream like that is a very nice head start to a well-funded retirement.
And it’s totally scalable: Got more? Great!
We’ll keep building up your income stream, right along with your additional capital.
And you’ll never have to touch your nest egg capital – which means you won’t have to worry about or running out of money in retirement, or even the day-to-day ups and downs of the stock market.
The only thing you need to concern yourself with is the security of your dividends.
As long as your payouts are safe, who cares if your stock prices swing up or down on a given day?
Most investors know this is the right approach to retirement.
Problem is, they don’t know how to find 8%, and 10% yields to fund their lives.
And when they do find high yields, they’re not sure if these payouts are safe. Will the company or fund have enough cash flow to pay the dividends into the future?
And how sensitive are these payouts to the latest headline, Fed policy change or unrest on the other side of the globe?
We’ll talk specific stocks, funds and yields in a moment.
But first, a bit about myself.
I graduated cum laude with an industrial engineering degree — which is actually pretty popular with Wall Street recruiters.
But I couldn’t stand the thought of grinding it out in a cubicle for 80 hours a week. So I moved to San Francisco and got into the tech scene.
A buddy and I started up two software companies that serve more than 26,000 business users.
The result was a nice chunk of change coming in … and I had to decide what to do with my money.
I had seen plenty of young “techies” come into sudden cash and burn through their windfall in a year, ending up right back where they started.
That was NOT going to be me. I already had dreams of living off my wealth one day, decades before I retired.
I got plenty of cold calls from brokers wanting to “help” me. But I knew that nobody would care as much about my money as me.
So I went out on my own and invested my startup profits in dividend-paying stocks.
I’ve been hunting down safe, stable and generous yields ever since, growing my wealth with vehicles paying me 8%, 9%, even 10%+ dividends.
Over the past 10+ years, I’ve been writing about the methods I use to generate these high levels of income.
Today I serve as chief investment strategist for Contrarian Income Report — a publication that uncovers secure, high-yielding investments for thousands of investors.
Since inception, my subscribers have enjoyed dividends 5 times (and much more!) the S&P 500 average, plus big annualized gains!
And that brings me to a crucial piece of advice…
The ONE Thing You Must Remember
If I could leave you with just one nugget of investing wisdom today, it would be to NEVER overlook the incredible wealth-building power of dividends.
Few investors realize how important these unglamorous workhorses actually are.
Here’s a perfect example…
If you put $1,000 in the dividend-paying stocks of the S&P 500 back in 1973, you would have had $96,970 by the end of 2024, or 97x your money.
But the same $1,000 in the non-dividend payers would have grown to just $8,990 — 91% less.
That’s why I’m a dividend fan.
The stock market is a fantastic wealth-building machine, but it doesn’t always go straight up!
There have been plenty of 10-year periods where the only money investors made was in dividends.
And that’s what gives us dividend investors such an edge.
When you lock in an 8%+ yield, you’re booking an income stream that’s bigger than the stock market’s long-term average return right off the bat.
Of course you can’t just buy every ticker symbol out there with a flashy yield, or you’ll get burned pretty fast.
So let’s wipe the false promises of mainstream finance from our minds and start thinking the “No Withdrawal” way…
Step 1: Forget “Buy and Hope” Investing
Most half-million-dollar stashes are piled into “America’s ticker” SPY.
The SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY) is the most popular symbol in the land. For many 401(K)’s, this is all there is.
And that’s sad for two reasons.
First, SPY yields just 1.1%. That’s $5,500 per year on $500K invested… poverty level stuff.
Second, consider a hypothetical year when, say, SPY fell 20%, not at all out of the question, given the multiyear run stocks have been on. Just from that alone, your $500K would be slashed to $400K.
SPY was down nearly 20% that year. That is no bueno, because that $500K would have been reduced to $400K.
The last thing we want to do is lose the money we’re getting in dividends (or more) to losses in the share price. Which is why we must protect our capital at all costs.
Step 2: Ditch 60/40, Too
The 60/40 portfolio has been exposed as senseless.
Retirees were sold a bill of goods when promised that a 60% slice of stocks and 40% of bonds would somehow be a “safe mix” that would not drop together.
Oops.
Inflation — plus an aggressive Federal Reserve, plus a (thus far) persistently steady economy — drop-kicked equities and fixed income before they went on a serious bull run in 2023, 2024 and into 2025 (with a brief interruption for the April “tariff tantrum.”)
It just goes to show that bonds are not the haven guaranteed by the 60/40 high priests. They could easily plunge just as hard (or harder) than stocks in the next economic crisis.
Just like they did in 2022 (sorry, we’re only going to spend one second on that disaster of a year). US Treasuries plunged, which resulted in the iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF (TLT) getting tagged.
Sure, it still paid its dividend. But even including payouts, the fund was down 31% — worse than the S&P 500. Ouch!
When stocks and bonds are dicey, where do we turn? To a better bet.
A strategy to retire on dividends alone that leaves that beautiful pile of cash untouched.
Step 3: Create a “No Withdrawal” Portfolio
My colleague Tom Jacobs and I literally wrote the book on a dividend-powered retirement.
In How to Retire on Dividends: Earn a Safe 8%, Leave Your Principal Intact, we outline our “no withdrawal” approach to retirement:
To make that nest egg last, and our working life worthwhile, we really need yields in the 7% to 10% range. We typically don’t see these stocks touted on Bloomberg or CNBC, but they are around.
Of course, there are plenty of landmines in the high-yield space. Some of these stocks are cheap for a reason. Which is why we need to be contrarian when looking for income.
We must identify why a yield is incorrectly allowed to be so high. (In other words, we need to figure out why the stock is priced so cheaply!)
The Only Reliable Retirement Solution
Instead of ever selling your stocks, you should instead make sure you live on dividends alone so that you never have to touch your capital.
Shares climb a wall of worry and in times of market stress, sleep soundly at night knowing that when the dividends roll in you will be buying shares at a lower price and therefore a higher yield. If you buy the correct shares, you should enjoy that gently increasing yield for as long as you own the share.
Mar. 16, 2026
Colorado Wealth Management Fund
Investing Group Leader
Annaly Capital Management (NLY) has 4 series of preferred shares. I’ve traded in them from time to time. Currently, the one I’m excited about is NLY-I (NLY.PR.I).
I’ve written about shares of NLY-I several times. However, it has been rare for us to be able to post bullish ratings on them. Often the shares are just slightly above our targets for entry at The REIT Forum. That means that they are usually around 0.2% to 1.5% above our targets. Our targets adjust for dividend accrual, so they continue to increase leading up to the ex-dividend date, and then they fall by the dividend amount.
Recently, we have seen a little bit of weakness in shares of NLY-I. The weakness is allowing us to come out with a bullish rating. Presently, shares of NLY-I are trading at $25.01. That gives them an annualized yield to call of about 4.7%. That sounds quite pathetic. However, investors should recognize that the low yield to call would only happen if shares were called immediately. If there is any delay before the call happens, then the investors would be collecting a stripped yield of about 8.94% during that time. That is far more attractive.
Annaly Capital Management has had plenty of opportunities to call these shares already. They became callable and began floating on June 30, 2024. We are about 21 months past the date when shares became callable.
Further, shares of NLY-F (NLY.PR.F) are also floating-rate shares with a very similar spread. Those shares began floating on September 30, 2022. NLY-F has not been called despite floating for over 3 years.
I believe NLY-I is more attractive than NLY-F because NLY-I costs 36 cents less ($25.01 vs. $25.37) and the yield is better.
The dividend policy results in NLY-I having dividends that are a tiny bit larger. At first glance, it would appear that NLY-F would have the slightly larger dividends because the floating spread is higher by 1.4 basis points (basically a rounding error). However, NLY-I utilizes a more favorable method for calculating dividends. It uses the actual number of days in a dividend period divided by a 360-day year. That sounds complicated, but I’ll make it simple.
Consequently, our targets for NLY-I are slightly higher than our targets for NLY-F. However, the market has been valuing NLY-F at a higher price than NLY-I. Consequently, the annualized yield to call for NLY-F is negative, but the annualized yield to call for NLY-I is okay. Not great, but it’s okay. Remember that you only get such a low yield if the shares are called immediately after you purchase them. If the shares remain outstanding for longer, then the yield turns out quite a bit better. If they are not called at all, then you have a yield around the stripped yield of 8.95% with quarterly payouts. That’s pretty good.
Since the shares could be called on 30 days’ notice, we are coming to our estimate for annualized yield to call using that brief 30-day window. Being stuck with a return of 3% to 5% for a month is not bad. But if you get under 3%, then you really want it to be related to a brief period. This is a bit strange because, all else being equal, you typically want call protection to exist.
You won’t find call protection on the shares that are already floating, though. The floating-rate shares in this sector were all initially fixed-rate shares that switched over to a floating rate at the same time that the shares became callable. Because treasury rates increased significantly a few years ago, the floating-rate shares became significantly more attractive.
NLY-G is almost always above our targets. I punish it for having such a thin floating spread. The market doesn’t seem to mind, but I find it as a bigger issue because it makes NLY-G even more reliant on short-term interest rates.
One of my goals in setting the targets for NLY-I was that they would result in a very slightly positive yield to call. Today we have a positive yield to call and a slight discount to our target prices. Consequently, I am approaching shares with a mindset of collecting the attractive yield until we see a bump in the price. I believe we will most likely see a modest increase in the stripped price at some point. That means the share price adjusted for dividend accrual would probably increase by 0.5% to 1.5%. So the objective is to collect the dividend yield for now and then eventually collect a modest price improvement.
If we see the stripped price going up by about 1% or 1.5%, that could be a signal to me that it would be time to consider taking the gains and looking to reallocate. These are pretty steady shares, though. If the market tips lower, they probably won’t fall all that much. In that case, I might end up with mediocre performance but strong relative performance. That would still be okay, because it would allow us to reallocate at favorable ratios. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
Of course, it is always possible that a share price could decline further. However, historically, we haven’t seen that much. Since NLY-I began floating, it has very rarely traded below $25. That makes sense for a few reasons. The first is that it results in a yield around 9% or even higher when the Fed funds rate was higher. The next is that there are more buyers for shares around $25 because there are many retail investors who would scan for shares that offered a high yield and traded below $25. That creates a decent level of support for the shares and explains why they have been so resistant to moving below $25 aside from the large hit to the markets around Liberation Day.
Annaly Capital Management is a mortgage REIT. They own a bunch of mortgage-backed securities. The vast majority of the portfolio is in agency mortgage-backed securities. Those have very strong credit qualities because they are supported by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Consequently, the mortgage REITs that focus on agency mortgages, like Annaly Capital Management, Dynex Capital, and AGNC Investment Corp., typically have a low-risk level for their preferred shares. Some investors absolutely love the business model for the agency mortgage REITs. They see a big dividend yield on the common shares and significant “earnings,” which makes the shares look very cheap on a price-to-earnings multiple.
However, many of those investors don’t understand how the earnings metric for mortgage REITs works. They may be confused with the way yields are calculated based on historical price and how hedges flow through the income statement. Consequently, for most investors, it is much better to focus on the preferred shares. We cover the common shares within our service. However, presently, the REIT forum finds NLY-I much more attractive than the common shares.
I’ve been buying NLY-I lately. This screenshot is from our tool for subscribers that shows all our open positions. We separate the preferred shares and baby bonds from the other sectors, so this only shows the preferred shares and baby bonds:
It cuts off before showing the new positions we added on 3/16/2026, but I think that’s quite a large amount of open trades for an analyst to include in their article.
NLY-I offers an attractive combination of steady valuation and solid dividend yield. While it could drop further, I find it unlikely. I expect quite a bit of resistance around $25.00, as it shows up on the screening tools for more investors when it hits that price or a couple of pennies below.
Consequently, I believe the downside is relatively low while the yield is high. We have the potential for modest upside in the share price, but I would only expect around 1% to 1.5% beyond dividend accrual. Since dividend accrual is running nearly 9%, that’s not too bad.
I put over $100k into acquiring 4,148 shares of NLY-I. I eat my own cooking. Right now, it tastes like 9% with a bit of upside.
We are not rating NLY common shares in this article.
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