Market Wrap-up for July 7 – Making Moves

With a busy earnings season about to kick off, now is a great time to review your portfolio holdings and consider some potential moves.

Some New Recommendations to Consider

Just this morning, we upgraded five new high-yield stocks to our industry-leading Best Dividend Stocks list. The full details surrounding the upgrades are available here (you’ll need to log into your Premium account to see them), but I’ll share with you the mindset behind these big moves:

The markets are in dire need of a pullback, but we found some names that are actually a bit undervalued. Raising the average yield within your portfolio is a good idea right now. Several of our new picks yield 5% or more. The MLP space is looking attractive again – high yields and relatively low valuations. We have another group of potential upgrades we’re considering as well, we’re just waiting on some better visibility, which we expect to get when these companies report earnings this month. Time to Ring the Register?

An old saying on Wall Street goes “Sell when you can, not when you have to.” I believe this bit of wisdom applies perfectly to today’s markets.

If you’ve been investing over the past several years, you likely have at least a couple of names you own that have made major upside moves (think +50% or more). It might be a good idea to take some profits in these cases. Remember, missing an extra potential 5% to 10% upside move won’t kill you. In the mean time, you can use the funds generated to get into some better-valued names.

Also, you don’t have to liquidate your entire positions all at once. Quite the contrary – just as we advocate scaling into stocks over time, so too should you scale out of names. So although we’re all buy-and-hold investors, taking a bit off the table amid the difficult current investing environment makes a lot of sense.