The SNOWBALL has a comparator share, where if 100k of seed capital had been invested on the same date as the SNOWBALL, how much income could you take today ?
The comparator share is VWRP and the income comparison is using the 4% rule. More information on the 4% rule if you use the search box above.
The 2026 income for the SNOWBALL will be 12k, which is currently being re-invested to buy more shares that pay a dividend.
The current income for VWRP is £6,920. When the markets fall that figure will most probably fall.
When the markets fall the SNOWBALL will be able to re-invest the earned dividends at a higher yield.
Looking further ahead the income for the SNOWBALL in less than ten years should be 24k and the income from VWRP is the known unknown.
Safety in numbers.
Whilst you still may buy a clunker, inside a collective if one share cuts their dividend it makes very little difference to the paid out dividend.
Brett Owens, Chief Investment Strategist Updated: September 2, 2026
Three investors walk into a bar and start talking retirement. But just two of them volunteer their honest opinions.
The third sits there and haughtily judges them!
First up, a 75-year-old retiree. He looks at what the S&P 500 (America’s ticker!) offers these days. Today, it’s never paid less. Our veteran investor shrugs and gives up on dividends: “Not much you can do about these paltry yields.”
His counterpart is a 79-year-old who was told as a young man that he would care more about his dividends as he aged. Yup. (Spoiler alert! “They” were right, the man says. More from him later.)
Meanwhile, their judgy counterpart is, of course, a professor! He lacks their experience in the markets but that doesn’t stop him from casting aspersions. They’re both kidding themselves, he taunts. He even has a name for their mistake: the “free dividend fallacy!”
One correction on the story above. It wasn’t a bar—all three turned up in the same Wall Street Journal story. Yet reading it made me feel like I’d been overserved at our hypothetical dividend tavern. Let’s break down why the investors’ stories are relevant to our retirement goals.
First, the 75-year-old shrugging about low yields. Why? I suspect two reasons.
For starters, his quote smells like a roll of Benjamins. The type rich guys peel off and give to their kids. In fact, he mentions in the story that rather than reinvest his dividends, he’s handing the checks to his children instead.
Obviously not a dude who needs every dividend payment. He’s a retired doctor, and I assume his cash pile climbs plenty high.
But lots of dough, believe it or not, can be an income handicap. You receive too much vanilla financial advice. He mentions money market funds and yes, when your nest egg is sizeable enough, 3% payouts will cover the bills. And you can lament it is what it is at the country club without too much actual pain.
For you and me though, the multi-million-dollar option isn’t on the table. And that’s OK because we have available lanes on our income highway that pay 7%, 8% or even better. This yield advantage lets us generate as much passive cash flow on our $1 million as our doctor friend does on $2.5 or $3 million.
With 8% yields, we can collect $80,000 on a $1 million nest egg, without having to sell a single share. That’s 7%, or $70,000, better than America’s ticker, which yields an all-time low 1% today:
And here’s the advantage of this strategy: It makes our day-to-day way more peaceful and a lot less stressful. We don’t have to follow the market. We don’t live by whether the S&P 500 is up or down today. Yes, our account balance bounces around with everyone else’s. Our income doesn’t.
Here’s why. That $80,000 works out to $6,667 per month, hitting our account like clockwork. Now, contrast that with the withdrawal strategy—selling shares every month to raise the same $6,667. Suddenly, it matters a great deal whether the market is up or down!
A down market becomes the worst thing for us, because we must sell more shares of SPY to raise our $6,667. We find ourselves rooting for the market to rally so we sell fewer. But the market doesn’t care what we need! The market does what the market does and this market is a roller coaster. Do you want a bad month putting a dent in your retirement?
Here’s the choice. I ran the numbers on it. You can take $1 million in SPY and withdraw $6,667 every month, selling shares along the way. But if you try this during a down year like 2022, you’ll consume 36% more of your shares than selling in a calm year. And the shares are gone for good!
See, the problem is that when we sell lots of shares low, these shares never come back. Our principal has been reduced—permanently.
Our professor friend says it’s all the same. Well—how is it all the same if we sell more shares when stocks are low?
To be fair, the professor has a point. Dividends are not free money. When a company pays out a dollar, the share price drops by that dollar. He’s right about that.
He’s also right to warn people who chase a yield without verifying the income stream behind it. Market history is filled with companies that paid dividends they couldn’t afford to keep investors from selling, only to hit the wall and lose them with a dividend cut later.
We, as careful contrarians, know this. We do the math on what’s funding our dividends before we buy them. We check that a fund earns more than it pays out. When it does, the payout comes from profits—not from our principal. The fallacy only bites the folks who never check.
Where the professor loses me is at diversification. He warns that dividend investors end up un-diversified. That’s true, if you don’t know what you’re doing. Our income portfolio spreads across six independent buckets, among them Safe Muni Bonds paying 7% to 8% (federal tax-free, so we keep more of it), Energy Toll Collectors—our oil and gas pipelines—and our Dividend Lifeboats, covered-call funds paying 9% to 11%. Plus, a bond-fund lane paying up to 17% (yes, 17%). And two more buckets we’ll save for another day.
These six payout streams don’t rely on the same engine. For example, muni coupons don’t care what option premiums did this month.
Contrast that with the S&P 500. Did you know that just seven stocks make up one-third of the index? One-third! Should be called the S&P 7:
And here’s the uncomfortable part that newbie dividend investors don’t want to hear: Dividends can disappear. UWM Holdings (UWMC) suspended its dividend and its stock plunged 35%. Papa John’s (PZZA) pulled its payout the very next day.
When we build an income portfolio, we’re not buying, holding and closing our eyes forever. We watch our payers. We make sure the businesses we own keep generating enough cash to fund their payouts. If and when the landscape or the fundamentals change, we move money between positions.
In other words, we never have to sell shares to pay the bills. When we move money between payers, that’s our choice—made on our schedule.
And hey, if we’re doing it wrong according to a judgy WSJ professor, that’s just fine with us.
Which brings me back to our 79-year-old friend at the bar. As a young man he was told he’d care more about his dividends with every year that passed. Now comfortably retired, he says, “Now I can attest to that as fact!” Smart… and our kind of guy! The professor can keep the fallacy. We’ll keep the checks.
If you have your own Snowball, it will return income in the form of dividends to re-invest when markets are falling. Luckily Bear markets are much shorter than Bull markets, so when markets start to rise, not only will you receive more dividends to re-invest, you should make a capital gain on the shares bought as the market fell.
If a Downturn Is Coming, 50 Years of Market History Says This Is the Single Best Response
Wall Street history is pretty clear: if there’s a bear market on the way, you’ll probably want to follow Winnie the Pooh’s sage advice.
By Reuben Gregg Brewer – Sep 5, 2026
Key Points
The stock market goes up and down over time, but the long-term trend is upward.
Getting caught up in the zigs and zags of Wall Street could leave you worse off than simply doing nothing.
Winnie the Pooh probably isn’t the investment guru that first comes to mind when you think about Wall Street. And yet he has offered some pretty sage investing advice: “Doing nothing often leads to the very best of something.” The history of investing over the past 50 years very clearly shows that this fictional, honey-loving bear could be on to something. Here’s why.
The S&P 500 goes up and down, and then up again
Turning to a real person, iconic investor Warren Buffett, the former CEO of Berkshire Hathaway(BRKA-0.48%)(BRKB-0.41%), has said that “Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with the 130 IQ. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing.”
Image source: Getty Images.
The issue of temperament is where Buffett and Pooh intersect. That’s because the S&P 500 index‘s (^GSPC-0.38%) history shows that Wall Street switches between bull and bear markets in a zigzag fashion, while generally moving higher over time. The chart below shows that simply buying and holding the S&P 500 index would have yielded a positive long-term outcome if you had the temperament to do nothing while it gyrated in the short term.
In fact, Warren Buffett has actually suggested that most investors would be better off just buying the S&P 500 index and… doing nothing. That’s not entirely true; Buffett would likely recommend continuing to regularly buy an S&P 500 index ETF, such as SPDR S&P 500 ETF(SPY-0.39%) or Vanguard S&P 500 ETF(VOO-0.38%), regardless of market conditions.
Think long term, even when Wall Street is thinking short term
Buying every month (or at another regular interval) is known as dollar-cost averaging, which can be a powerful wealth-building tool. But the real key is to avoid market timing, or trying to buy and sell to take advantage of short-term price movements. That is difficult, if not impossible, to do successfully over the long term. Market timing would be one of the “urges” that get investors into trouble. And if you have the right temperament, 50 years of Wall Street history says you shouldn’t do it.
Instead, you should channel your inner Winnie the Pooh and do nothing. Well, nothing other than sticking to the same investment plan you had before the bear market downturn. In the end, buying and holding for the long term has a pretty incredible 50-year track record.
Most of the growth happens in the later years, when returns start earning returns at a larger base.
WSP looks like a long-run compounder with record backlog and rising profitability, supported by global infrastructure demand.
The key risks are valuation, acquisition execution, and how AI changes parts of engineering work.
A $10,000 investment doesn’t look like the beginning of a fortune. Give it 20 years, though, and it can become surprisingly ambitious.
At an illustrative 8% annual return, a single $10,000 investment left to compound for 20 years would grow to about $46,610. No additional contributions. No perfectly timed trades. Just time doing something investors frequently underestimate.
The Ontario Securities Commission’s investor education site describes compounding simply: returns are reinvested so they can begin earning returns of their own. The longer that process continues, the larger its contribution becomes. The early years are the least exciting part.
Decades of income
After 10 years at an illustrative 8%, $10,000 becomes roughly $21,589. That’s already respectable. Leave it invested another decade and the value more than doubles again.
* Returns as of July 30th, 2026
TIME INVESTED
ILLUSTRATIVE VALUE AT 8%
Starting investment
$10,000
10 years
$21,589
15 years
$31,722
20 years
$46,610
An 8% return isn’t guaranteed. Stocks certainly won’t deliver it in a tidy straight line, either. Some years could produce enormous gains and others will make investors question every decision they’ve made since breakfast. The point is what happens when gains remain invested.
After 20 years, the original $10,000 generated roughly $36,610 of growth. The investor supplied less than one-quarter of the final portfolio value. Compounding did the rest. That’s why I’d rather own quality businesses for years than constantly hunt for the next short-term winner. Compound growth needs something productive to compound.
WSP
WSP Global (TSX: WSP) provides engineering, design, and consulting services across transportation, buildings, water, energy, and environmental projects around the world.
That puts WSP stock behind a huge amount of infrastructure investors rarely think about. Roads need designing. Power grids need expanding. Water systems need upgrading. Data centres, transportation projects, and new energy infrastructure all require engineers long before the ribbon-cutting photos appear.
The latest quarter suggests customers aren’t running out of projects. WSP stock finished its second quarter with a record $20.1 billion backlog, up 23.2% from a year earlier. Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) increased 28.8% to $815 million, while organic net-revenue growth accelerated to 5%.
Looking ahead
Management also increased its 2026 financial outlook. For a long-term investor, that backlog may be the most interesting number. It represents work already waiting to be completed, giving WSP stock unusually good visibility into future revenue.
Meanwhile, WSP stock recently traded around $197. That remains roughly one-third below its 52-week high near $291. So, the stock isn’t exactly cheap at around 27 times trailing earnings. Even so, investors are paying considerably less than they were near the peak despite WSP producing record backlog and stronger profitability.
Part of the concern centred on whether artificial intelligence (AI) could eventually automate portions of engineering and design work. I wouldn’t dismiss that risk. WSP stock also grows heavily through acquisitions, and paying too much or integrating a major deal poorly could damage returns.
Its recent pursuit of Dutch engineering firm Arcadis shows both sides of that strategy. A successful acquisition could expand WSP stock substantially, but increasingly large deals also require increasingly careful capital allocation.
Bottom line
That’s why I wouldn’t buy WSP stock expecting another 8% every year like clockwork. I’d buy it because infrastructure spending, electricity demand, urban growth, and aging public assets can provide decades of work. Investors buying stocks in Canada don’t need every holding to double tomorrow.
Sometimes $10,000 simply needs a good business and enough time to become $46,610.
You may have read that Smaller Company shares are under valued.
But just in case, you are early or late to the news, you want a dividend to re-invest in your Snowball, in case your research is wrong.
Current yield 7% but higher risk as the market cap is very modest.
Chelverton UK Dividend Trust PLC – Chelmsford, England-based investor in UK small- to mid-cap companies – Net asset value per share rises 8.4% to 144.20 pence at April 30 from 133.04p the year prior. Revenue return per share is 7.42p down 45% from 13.32p. Dividends per share paid in the financial year are 10.75p, down from 12.90p the year before. This results in a total return of 16%, the firm says, below the AIC UK Equity Income sector share price total return of 19% and a NAV total return of 17%. “Despite the uncertainties, we continue to be confident in the prospects for companies in the small and mid-cap sector, whose market rating remains historically low,” Chelverton says. “We believe the company continues to offer a compelling combination of an attractive dividend yield and the potential for capital upside from any recovery in the UK small and midcap market. The board keeps market circumstances under review and will continue to seek opportunities to reintroduce gearing into the company’s structure.”
The Next Boom Could Come From a Surprising Place. This 8.5% Dividend Is Ready
by Michael Foster, Investment Strategist
We don’t often see the European Union as a major driver of stock returns.
I mean, American investors usually see the EU as stuffy and overregulated – when they think about it at all! But I urge you to reconsider, because this could be about to change.
When it does, funds with exposure to the continent – including an 8.5%-yielding closed-end fund (CEF) called the Allspring Global Dividend Opportunity Fund (EOD) – could catch a lift.
Let me be clear: This potential boost from Europe is only one reason to take a look at EOD. The main one is the fund’s discount to net asset value (NAV, or the value of its underlying portfolio). It’s in the “sweet spot”: cheap, at 8.3%, but moving toward par.
EOD’s Discount Trend Shifts in Our Favor I expect that to continue for two reasons. The first: EOD’s US investments, which account for about two-thirds of its portfolio, stand to gain from ongoing growth here, capped with a productivity boost from AI. Lower interest rates in the longer run would add an extra kick.
That’s the foundation of our play.
Then Europe comes in with a setup to boost the roughly 13% of EOD’s portfolio held on the continent and in the UK.
What’s Happening Across the Pond
Let me start with something most American investors don’t realize about their European cousins: They’re just not as into stocks as we are.
The data, based on recent figures from the European Central Bank, tells the story: 32% of workers’ wealth is kept in cash, versus 11% in the US. And although 31% of US wealth is in stocks, just 5% of EU wealth is.
The result is a lot of cash on the sidelines, and for a bloc eager to trigger new investments, it’s low-hanging fruit. About $11-trillion euros (or around $12.5 trillion) of low-hanging fruit, to be exact! To unleash that cash, the EU is considering special tax treatment for investors. New kinds of low-minimum accounts are being rolled out across the continent, too.
The question then becomes: How can we grab upside (and income) as more of this cash rolls into stocks?
Let me be clear that our route does not run through CEFs directly: Due to other regulations, American CEFs are difficult for Europeans to buy. So we can’t expect a wave of euros to flood into our favorite income plays.
There are limitations, too. One is the well-known phenomenon of home-country bias, or the tendency for people to buy stocks in the nation in which they live. Plus, there are legal and regulatory restrictions, since European lawmakers are aiming to encourage European stock investment.
That steers us back to EOD. With its European exposure (backstopped by a strong base in the US), that shrinking 8.3% discount and an 8.5% dividend yield, it’s a “one-stop shop” as more investment in America and Europe lifts stocks in the US and the EU.
Beyond that, we have a history of strong performance, with EOD posting an 11.8% annualized total return, on a market-price basis, over the last decade, beating the benchmark Vanguard European Stock Index Fund ETF (VGK).
And on a NAV basis, EOD has been crushing VGK, too (see the purple line in the five-year chart below):
EOD’s Portfolio Outruns European Stocks That’s not surprising for a fund whose portfolio is fronted by outperformers like NVIDIA (NVDA), Apple (AAPL), Alphabet (GOOGL) and Microsoft (MSFT). The fund also boosts its income through its holdings of high-yield corporate bonds (around 20% of the portfolio). In addition, it sells covered-call options on its holdings – a strategy that generates extra income for the fund and performs best in volatile markets.
That’s another key, because I do expect more volatility as we enter the last few months of 2026, with midterms in the US, ongoing uncertainty in the Middle East and rising yields on long-term government bonds, both in the US and globally.
We also love the fact that the fund has been returning recent strong gains in its NAV to investors in the form of a rising dividend. As you can see below, the payout has been climbing since 2023, right around the time the fund’s NAV started to take off:
Source: Income Calendar I expect more gains, and potentially further dividend hikes, as EOD’s portfolio benefits from continued strength in the US and more stock investment from Europe. That’s just the kind of diversified setup we crave in an uncertain market like today‘s.
The fact that we can get in for 92 cents on the dollar, thanks to EOD’s discount, is a bonus.
Your Best Play? Mix “Unloved” Europe With AI Gains for Big Upside, 10% Payouts
As contrarians, we’re always on the lookout for situations like the one brewing in Europe right now.
Europe has always been overlooked in the US, where it’s (too) often seen as a bastion of regulation and slow growth.
That’s changing. And CEFs like EOD give us a nice way to grab a piece of the action, with a portfolio boasting a solid position in Europe and a strong base of US stocks.
Since its pioneering IPO two decades ago, HICL Infrastructure (HICL) has established itself as the leading core infrastructure trust, generating an NAV total return of 8.5% p.a. through different cycles, from both income and capital growth. A recent period of static dividends ended in the financial year ending 31/03/2026, and HICL’s board expects Dividends to 31/03/2028 to grow at an annualised 1.8%, while maintaining dividend cover at 1.1x.
Since HICL’s IPO, the infrastructure landscape has evolved and so has HICL, adding more diversified sources of return through different types of infrastructure across several geographies, alongside projects in different sectors and, selectively, at an earlier stage. Active management has also played a role, through project optimisation and judging when investments are ready for disposal. Increasingly, HICL’s investments, such as New Zealand’s FortySouth mobile towers business, are operating companies with capacity to grow, while retaining the key infrastructure characteristic of long-term stable and contracted revenues. HICL has therefore come a long way since its beginnings as a predominantly UK PFI investor.
In July 2026, the HICL team set out a detailed plan that, at a headline level, will gradually increase target medium-term returns from the 7–8% range set at IPO in 2006 to 10%. This builds on their record and is expected to be achieved while maintaining dividend growth and cover. Disposals of maturing assets and excess cashflows will be partly used to increase exposure to the new class of ‘enhancer’ assets, while c.80% of HICL’s portfolio is expected to remain in the familiar ‘yielder’ and ‘grower’ categories that have powered its long-term performance. This carefully thought-out plan reflects today’s long-term infrastructure opportunity landscape and, in the Portfolio section, we look at how HICL’s long-term performance includes significant contributions from both higher-returning investments and active management. The revised strategy could, therefore, be seen as a natural evolution of the team’s existing strengths and track record in a higher-rate environment.
Analyst’s View
One of the most striking numbers in HICL’s long-term performance is the comparison between its 20-year annualised NAV total return of 8.5% and the weighted average discount rate of 7.9% over the same period. In simple terms, discount rates give an indication of expected returns before fees. If the HICL team had achieved only what was modelled, the returns would have been less than 7% rather than the 8.5% actually achieved. The gap is explained by the team pulling the active management levers discussed above. As the revised strategy plays out, it seems very likely that HICL’s portfolio will come to include more of the types of investments that play to those strengths.
While the precise details of HICL’s plan for the next twenty years were revealed in July 2026, the direction has been clear for a while. The market has rewarded HICL with a significant share price rise this year as it starts to move past the end of the ‘bond proxy’ era that so heavily influenced HICL’s and peers’ share prices from 2022. That upward trajectory has continued since the announcement and puts HICL on a discount of under 15%. By the standards of the last twenty years that remains wide, but in a more recent context, it shows the success of HICL’s capital allocation policy, including share buybacks, and greater appreciation of HICL’s growth prospects. And, of course, a welcome return to dividend growth. If delivered, HICL’s plan for the next twenty years has the potential to reinforce its position as one of the UK’s leading listed infrastructure investment companies, while continuing to provide long-term income and capital growth for shareholders.
Bull
HICL has evolved to embrace the wider opportunity set of today’s infrastructure market and higher interest rates
Return to dividend growth
Discount has narrowed to a more sustainable level, although there is still work to be done
Bear
A higher return target has the potential to require more risk
Many of HICL’s investments are leveraged, which can amplify losses as well as gains
Rising interest rates and government bond yields could be a headwind
