Often times I feel the need to deviate my stock portfolio away from SPY, VOO and similar broad-based ETFs and mutual funds. It’s fun and sadistically exhilarating to shock your nervous system once in a while with individual stocks. Crazy, I know.
For over a decade I felt that Seeking Alpha had some of the best and most thoughtful commentary on objective recommendations for buying stocks. Available options for a more professional community-based approach to this type of advice has always been in short supply, hence why SA prospers. Occasionally, one in every 20 posts is still quite meaningful, but for the most part, the content (and probably contributors) has deteriorated much since the early days.
Today I noticed the top recommendation was a mREIT called AGNC. I’m of the opinion that very few REITs in general are worth buying and holding in the long term, mainly because most the attractive dividends are almost always negated by the long term loss of the underlying asset itself. Well, I think I’ve been on to something, because this latest recommendation both validated my theory and annoyed me to the point that I wrote this entire post to vent about it.
Without boring you further and making this post into a rebuttal stock advice post for AGNC, I present you with the 5 year chart for this recommended “insanely fat yielding mREIT” as I paraphrase. Yea… your eyes don’t deceive you, that looks like a downward trend since 2019 with bumps and bruises along the way. Oh yea and the dividend yields have been steadily shrinking too.
Interestingly, as I was looking for this chart on Yahoo! Finance, which is still amazingly more relevant for Yahoo! than it’s email service ever was, I stumbled upon this Motley Fool post that agrees with me for a change.
If I was to leave you with a point for all this, I suppose it would be to use an actual community of active investors that will chastise one another for doling out bad advice and shitty recommendations. That takes us to Reddit’s investing forums. Enjoy and I’ll probably see you there if you made it this far.
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