I have bought an opening position in PCT. (see earlier post)

28 Shares for £200.The purchases will make very little difference to the SNOWBALL until a meaningful amount is invested.

Results analysis: Octopus Renewables Infrastructure

ORIT remains on track to pay its target dividend.

Alan Ray

Updated 25 Sep 2026

Disclaimer

Disclosure – Non-Independent Marketing Communication

This is a non-independent marketing communication commissioned by Octopus Renewables Infrastructure (ORIT). The report has not been prepared in accordance with legal requirements designed to promote the independence of investment research and is not subject to any prohibition on the dealing ahead of the dissemination of investment research.

• Octopus Renewables Infrastructure’s (ORIT) interim results to 30/06/2026 show a NAV total return of -5.0% and a share price total return of 13.7%.
• ORIT remains on track to meet its dividend target for the financial year ending 31/12/2026 of 6.23p (2025: 6.17p), with two interim dividends totalling 3.11p already declared. In the first half, dividend cover from operational cash flows increased to 1.38x (H1 2025: 1.19x). At the current share price (as at 24/09/2026), the yield is c. 10%.
• The NAV per share was 86.2p (31/12/2025: 93.8p), a c. 8% decline. Net assets therefore fell to £455m from £495m. The main components of this reduction were a review of ORIT’s onshore wind assets, which updated future assumptions about their yield using the latest operational and technical data. This led to a reduction in net assets of ~£30m. Other contributors were lower long-term power price forecasts and increased discount rates.
• ORIT’s weighted average discount rate increased to 8.3% (31/12/2025: 7.8%). This is calculated on operational assets; factoring in the developer company assets, as well as the impacts of FX and the RCF, the adjusted discount rate was 8.8% (31/12/2025: 8.2%). The increase is a result of sustained changes in market conditions and transaction evidence observed during the period.
• ORIT was geared 46.6% of gross asset value (GAV, 31/12/2025: 44.8%) or 87% as a percentage of NAV. The increase is a result of the lower GAV, and overall debt was reduced by £5.3m to £396.8m through a combination of scheduled amortisation and voluntary prepayments, partially offset by an increase in the utilisation of the RCF. Although gearing can fluctuate, the medium-term goal is to reduce gearing to 40%.
• Capital allocation: there were no new investments or disposals during the period, although a number of new investment opportunities were assessed and rejected, largely on pricing grounds. A follow-on commitment of £5.7m was made to the UK solar pipeline in June, developed with BLC Energy, taking the total to £10.4m.
• ORIT is an Article 9 impact fund under SFDR. Impact highlights in the first half include 154k estimated equivalent tonnes of CO2 avoided (H1 2025: 165k) and 16,853 people benefiting from ORIT’s social initiatives, up significantly from 4,034 in H1 2025.
• Phil Austin, chair, said: “The first half of 2026 was challenging for ORIT, with NAV affected by the revised onshore wind yield assumptions, lower power-price forecasts and higher discount rates. Despite this, the underlying portfolio continued to generate strong, predictable cash flows.
• “We remain on track to deliver our increased FY 2026 dividend target, with dividends fully covered by operational cash flows during the period. Shareholders also saw a rising share price and a narrowing discount to NAV, although the discount remains a key focus for the Board.
• “We remain confident in the strength and diversification of the portfolio. With 86% of near-term revenues fixed or contracted, it continues to provide strong visibility and resilience, while recent M&A activity provides further evidence of the value within renewable infrastructure. Our focus remains on disciplined execution of ORIT 2030: completing asset sales, reducing gearing and selectively pursuing investments that deliver value for shareholders.”

Kepler View

From an Octopus Renewables Infrastructure (ORIT) specific perspective, this was a difficult first half, with a technical reassessment of the onshore wind portfolio leading to a significant reduction in NAV. However, what we can now say is that the valuation is rooted in actual technical data from the specific assets in question, with ORIT’s more mature solar assets and offshore wind assets already valued this way, and with just some of its more recently commissioned solar assets, which are performing in line with expectations, relying on pre-construction forecasts for their valuation. While no disposals were made in H1, the team reports that, while the listed renewables infrastructure trusts remain at wide discounts, in the wider world of renewables it sees an improvement in sentiment and there is demand for good-quality assets, albeit transactions are taking longer and are subject to rigorous scrutiny. The team has various sales processes underway and expects the next asset sales to complete in late 2026 or early 2027.

From a big-picture perspective, 2026 is unfolding as an important year for renewables. Whereas electricity demand in the UK and elsewhere has remained relatively constant for some time, all of the signs are that the electrification of the global economy is picking up pace, and there can be few investors who aren’t aware of the enormous challenge that the growth in datacentres will place on electricity grids. Yes, it’s true that investment is going into other forms of power generation, such as nuclear and even fusion, and these tend to attract headlines. But these remain enormously expensive, time-consuming to build or technically unproven, or combine all three characteristics. Renewables, combined with battery storage, by contrast, are proven technologies with large installed bases across many grids that are, even without subsidy, relatively cost-effective and quick to build. Yes, there are challenges, such as the need to upgrade power grids, the global demand for various common and uncommon metals and materials, and risks to supply chains, but those still need to be seen in the context of proven technology, where the engineering challenges are all well understood.

An understandable investor frustration with the listed sector is that 2026 also saw power price spikes caused by the unstable, difficult-to-predict crisis in the Persian Gulf, which continues to haunt energy markets. ORIT’s strategy of fixing the majority of its revenues (86% are fixed over the next two years to 30 June 2028) means it has limited exposure to short-term power-price spikes, but this is a function of one of its core propositions: a stable, growing dividend. It’s notable that although overall power generation was broadly on budget, revenue and EBITDA were slightly ahead as a result of incremental management actions. As a result, dividend cover has increased, and thus ORIT has delivered on one of its central objectives.

So, without downplaying that this has been a tough first half, ORIT now has a portfolio diversified across multiple European jurisdictions and operates a range of technologies that are all well understood from an operational and construction point of view, with relatively predictable economics. This is against a backdrop where electricity demand is starting to ramp up as the AI-datacentre build-out continues at pace. If that demand scenario plays out, then ORIT’s discount of 30% and yield of 10% could prove to be a very attractive entry point.

Bull

• Diversification provides quantifiable benefits to power output
• An 8% yield backed by a covered dividend growing in line with inflation
• Robust capital allocation policy enacted to address the discount

Bear

• Investor sentiment toward listed renewables is weak
• Capital allocation policy reduces ORIT’s ability to acquire new operational assets
• Gearing can amplify losses as well as gains

Primary Health Properties PLC

(“PHP” or the “Company”)

Notice of Interim Dividend

The Company announces that the fourth quarterly interim dividend in 2026 of 1.825 pence per ordinary share of a nominal value of 12.5 pence each (“Dividend”) will be paid as 0.725 pence by way of a Property Income Distribution (“PID”) and the remainder as an ordinary dividend of 1.100 pence (“Non-PID”) on Friday, 20 November 2026 (“Dividend Payment Date”) to shareholders on the register on 16 October 2026 (“Record Date”). 

It’s your duty to check the latest dividend announcements for shares in your Snowball.

Several dividends for re-investment, 2b added to cash of £798.77

I’m going to add to the SNOWBALL a TR share, that is a share that doesn’t pay a dividend. I’m going to drip feed one hundred pounds of dividends into the share but only investing £200 because of costs. Hopefully the share price will fall as the SNOWBALL builds a position and one day the share will be sold and re-invested into a dividend paying share. Because the income is coming from earned dividends, the risk is lowered and it will make very little difference to the total income for the SNOWBALL.

High risk, so the plan is to drip feed a small amount of income into the share bi- monthly.

Wall Street Whales Can’t Buy This 12.8% Dividend—But We Contrarians Can!

Brett Owens, Chief Investment Strategist
Updated: September 23, 2026

“If winning isn’t supposed to matter, then why are they introducing a playoff system?”

I shook my head in disbelief as I whispered this unfolding “riddle” to my coaching buddy in the chair next to me. We were at the YMCA fall basketball meeting, sweating it out in the preschool room. (Where was the air conditioning on this sultry September evening?)

The YMCA regional manager, notorious for talking for an hour about the exact same thing to kick off every season, had something new. And to be honest, the “ruling” made no sense to me.

Playoffs? We’re talkin’ about…playoffs?

At the Y?

What a silly rule! We, as coaches, are supposed to play everyone equally. Our job is to develop players. Winning a game on a random Saturday afternoon in September shouldn’t come at the expense of poor Little Joey not being able to get off the end of the bench because his too-serious coach is in “win now” mode.

Alas, the room voted. The masses overruled my objections and implemented our playoff system.

Yet another “rule” that I will refuse to recognize. I don’t care if we make the playoffs. Just as I don’t care what the “middle rating agency” says about a particular bond.

Yes, Bondland can be like the YMCA! It runs by rules that may not make sense. Vanilla investors, like delusional weekend coaches, can be tempted into following them, however. It’s why the masses think it’s impossible to retire on dividends! They stop their shopping at investment-grade bond ETFs, like the iShares Core U.S. Aggregate Bond ETF (AGG) and the Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF (BND). They collect 4% or so and call it “good enough.”

Four percent is $40,000 on a million bucks. Not good enough!

These poverty-payout chasers play by the house rules in Bondland. But they don’t have to. It’s more profitable to swim away from the whales.

Which are massive animals. Global pension assets topped $68 trillion at the end of 2025. US insurance companies, meanwhile, held $5.7 trillion worth of bonds. That’s some whales!

For funds tracking the Bloomberg Aggregate, the rulebook is explicit: The index drops a bond when two of its three ratings fall below investment grade. The funds that track the Aggregate index sell the disgraced holding at their next month-end rebalance.

But the selling is often a knee-jerk reaction. Take the case of Celanese (CE), a chemical company that has been boosting debt levels to grow. Rating agencies don’t like borrowing, growth plans or not!

Celanese’s bonds started at 6.55%. S&P downgraded them first, then Moody’s piled on. The Moody’s downgrade is what knocked them below investment grade and out of the Aggregate index.

Now, the notes carry a “step-up clause,” which means every S&P or Moody’s cut raises the coupon by a quarter point. Four cuts later, the bonds that started at 6.55% will pay a full point more, 7.55%, starting this November. And here’s the part the whales missed: The price didn’t budge on the boot. It went up. The only real dip came eight weeks later, in the April 2025 selloff, when everything fell:

So the bond’s coupon moved up, its price held, and the April dip was the market’s, not the downgrade’s. How did Celanese respond? “I’ll show you” by reducing its net debt nearly 20% from $13.2 billion to $10.6 billion. The company made its payments just fine, rewarding those who bought the dip.

Bonds downgraded from investment grade to junk are called fallen angels. It’s become a popular bond buying strategy to buy them all. But be careful—they don’t all recover!

And honestly, do we want to—can we?—underwrite every chemical company and automaker? Analyze individual balance sheets and cash flows? Nah…we’ll hire the bond pros to make those calls!

This is the lucrative yield game that the pros at PIMCO play. The famous bond shop is the former home of the Bond King, Bill Gross, and current home of his successor, Dan “The Beast” Ivascyn. Ivascyn runs a series of closed-end funds through which we can buy downgraded and unloved bonds, handpicked by the Beast and his team.

My top bond CEF to buy right now is PIMCO Dynamic Income Opportunities Fund (PDO). Its mandate puts no cap on below-investment-grade bonds—only on the very lowest grades. No self-defeating rules here!

PDO uses 39% leverage as I write. Leverage can be risky in the wrong hands, but PDO’s recent payout coverage is strong: It earned $1.41 in income per $1 paid out over the last three months, and $1.11 over the last six, by PIMCO’s own estimates. That’s a lot of headroom.

As I write, the fund trades at a 4% discount to net asset value (the value of its bonds, net of borrowings), which means we can buy it for 96 cents on the dollar. This is compelling for a blue-blood bond fund like PDO, which traded at a 3.1% average premium over the past year, selling for $1.03 on the dollar. Today, 96 cents. Nice.

Why is a deal like this available?

First, the pension and insurance whales have many trillions to invest and rules that keep them out of the things PDO can own. We, as individuals, don’t have the trillion-dollar problem or the rulebook—and neither does Dan Ivascyn at PIMCO. That’s our collective edge. And remember, we can hire Ivascyn today for 96 cents on the dollar.

Second, rate worries. Over the last five years, PDO’s returns have averaged a lackluster 3.1% per year on the fund’s net asset value. The reason for the soft price is that interest rates rose from nearly zero to 5% in a hurry. Today, the damage is largely done and already priced in.

Ivascyn is a perennial winner at a game the whales don’t play. He’s the guru we want coaching up our fixed-income portfolio.

Contrairan Investor

Turn Your Portfolio Into a Monthly Income Machine

Discover the safe, simple way to lock in steady monthly dividends up to 16.2% right now!

Look, I know I don’t have to tell you that all of our monthly bills are going up—and fast.

Inflation is still too high. And retirees (or those who are hoping to retire) feel it the most.

It’s no wonder more and more people think they’ll never retire.

Especially when the media goes on and on about the massive sums needed to clock out—sums that feel outdated the moment they’re released!

Not so long ago, we used to think a million bucks was enough to retire. Now, it seems paltry.

Well, I’ve got good news for you. You very well may be able to clock out on a realistic amount of money (much less than a million!)

I’m talking about just $600,000 here. And in some parts of the country you could do it on even less.

Got more? Great. I’ll show you how you can retire well on your current stake.

I know that’s a bit tough to believe, but stick with me for a few moments and I’ll walk you through it.

The key is my “9% Monthly Payer Portfolio,” which lets you live on dividends alone—without selling a single stock to generate extra cash.

And you’ll get paid the same big dividends every month of the year—so that your income and expenses will once again be lined up!

This approach is a must if you want to quickly and safely grow your wealth and safeguard your nest egg through the next market correction, too!

This isn’t just a dividend play, either: this proven strategy also has the potential to deliver 10%+ price upside in addition to your monthly dividends.

That’s the Power of Monthly Dividends

We’ll talk more about that price upside shortly. First, let’s set up a smooth income stream that rolls in every month, not every quarter like the dividends you get from most blue-chip stocks.

You no doubt already know that it’s a pain to deal with payouts that roll in quarterly when our bills roll in monthly.

But convenience is far from the only benefit you get with monthly dividends. They also give you your cash faster—so you can reinvest it faster if you don’t need income from your portfolio right away.

More on that a little further on. First I want to show you…

How Not to Build a Solid Monthly Income Stream

When it comes to dividend investing, many “first-level” investors take themselves out of the game right off the hop.

That’s because they head straight to the list of Dividend Aristocrats—the S&P 500 companies that have hiked their payouts for 25 years or more.

That kind of dividend growth is impressive. But here’s the problem: These folks are forgetting that companies don’t need a high dividend yield to join this club—and without a high, safe payout, you can forget about generating a livable income stream on any reasonably sized nest egg.

Worse, you could be forced to sell stocks in retirement—maybe even into the kind of plunges we saw in March 2020 or throughout 2022—just to make ends meet.

That’s a nightmare for any retiree, and leaning too hard on the so-called Aristocrats can easily make it a reality: the ProShares S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats ETF (NOBL), which holds all 69 Aristocrats, still yields just 2% as I write this.

Solid Monthly Payers Are Rare Birds …

You can certainly build your own monthly income portfolio, and the advantage of doing so is obvious: you can target companies that pay more than your average Aristocrat’s paltry payout.

Trouble is, only a handful of regular stocks pay in any frequency other than quarterly, so we’ll have to patch together different payout schedules to make it happen.

To do that, let’s cherry-pick a combo of well-known payers and payout schedules that line up. Here’s an “instant” 6-stock monthly dividend portfolio that fits the bill:

• Procter & Gamble (PG) and AbbVie (ABBV) with dividend payments in February, May, August and November.
• Target (TGT) and Chevron (CVX), with payments in March, June, September and December.
• Sysco (SYY) and Wal-Mart Stores (WMT), with payments in January, April, July and October.

Here’s what $600,000 evenly split across these six stocks would net you in dividend payouts over the first six months of the calendar year, based on current yields and rates:

You can see the consistency starting to show up here, with payouts coming your way every single month, but they still vary widely—sometimes by $1,003 a month!

It’s pretty tough to manage your payments, savings and other needs on a lumpy cash flow like that.

And the bigger problem is that we’re pulling in $17,390 in yearly income on a $600,000 nest egg.

That’s not nearly enough for us to reach our ultimate goal of retiring on dividends alone, without having to sell a single stock in retirement.

We need to do better.

Which brings me to…

Your Best Move Now: 9%+ Dividends AND Monthly Payouts

This is where my “9% Monthly Payer Portfolio” comes in. With just $600,000 invested, it’ll hand you a rock-solid $54,000-a-year income stream. That could be enough to see many folks into retirement.

The best part is you won’t have to go back to “lumpy” quarterly payouts to do it!

Of all the income machines in this unique portfolio, nearly half pay dividends monthly, so you can look forward to the steady drip of income, month in and month out from these plays.

The TR chart for MRCH. After the covid crash there was plenty of time to buy into the price drop, always easier with hindsight.

If you bought at 400p, the current dividend is 30p, so a buying yield of 7.5% plus the yield from the dividends re-invested. April of last year another opportunity to buy. Maybe better to wait for a market crash before opening a new position but one for your watch list.

Merchants buys eight new stocks in increasingly ‘polarised’ UK market

The £992m UK Equity Income trust sold the likes of Unilever to take advantage of cheap stocks that were caught up in the software selloff.

By Lotte Edwards

Merchants (MRCH) made a flurry of purchases over the first half of the year, taking advantage of what lead manager Simon Gergel described as an increasingly ‘polarised’ UK market.

The £992m UK Equity Income trust run by Allianz established positions in eight new companies during the six months to the end of July.

In June alone, it deployed nearly 5% of the portfolio across three software and information services names: Auto Trader, Sage, and Wolters Kluwer. All three were caught up in an indiscriminate sell-off beginning in February over fears of disruption from artificial intelligence (AI).

‘For the first time in many years, these companies were trading on modest valuations and with dividend yields close to the market average or higher,’ Gergel said. ‘Whilst we acknowledge that AI does create some new potential risks, it also creates opportunities to sell incremental services.

‘By diversifying exposure across three stocks, we were taking advantage of what we believed was a mis-pricing of this area, without taking undue risk on any one company,’ he said.

Elsewhere, new positions were taken within the healthcare, travel & leisure, media, construction & materials, and life insurance sectors.

Helping to fund the buying spree, five positions were exited entirely, including consumer goods giant Unilever following the announced sale of its food business to US seasonings manufacturer McCormick.

‘Whilst we understand the logic of the deal, it will take a long time to complete and we decided to sell the shares to reinvest in a bigger position in Reckitt, which we believed offered better value,’ Gergel explained.

Over the reporting period, Merchants delivered a net asset value (NAV) total return of 9.3% and share price total return of 8.4%, outperforming the FTSE All-Share benchmark’s 7.9% gain. Over a five-year horizon, it remains ahead of its peers, with shares up 65.2% versus 59.7% for the average UK Equity Income trust.

Performance was aided by takeover bids at substantial premiums for two of the portfolio’s larger holdings, Tate & Lyle and DCC, providing external reassurance of the value hiding in overlooked UK stocks . They gained 50% and 40% respectively.

Despite a considerable rally for the FTSE All-Share over the past 12 months, the managers stressed that UK medium-sized companies − to which MRCH is tilted − look ‘particularly cheap’.

The board declared a first-half dividend of 15p per share, up 2.7% on last year and marking 44 consecutive years of increases. The period represents the final half-year report for chair Colin Clark, who will step down at the end of September.