Stockerblog submits:

There are plenty of stocks, including closed end funds, real estate trusts, master limited partnerships, and oil royalty trusts, which pay their dividends monthly. Lots of advantages are available with receiving monthly dividends including acceleration the investors' return of capital, faster compounding if the dividends are reinvested, provides a steadier cash flow, generally lower volatility, and some of the yields are partially or completely tax free.

At WallStreetNewsNetwork.com, they provide a downloadable list of over 300 monthly monthly dividend stocks. Here are a few examples of some with yields over 9%:

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"We're in for a multi-year period of pain," Ray Dalio of Bridgewater Associates tells Barron's. All major markets are down at least 40% this year as investors seem to have resigned themselves to some form of global recession. The debate has already shifted from the R word to the D word - will the global economy slip into depression?

Still, not all is bad. The good news, Barron's says, is that governments recognize the threat and are responding with unprecedented force, commodity prices are way down, and Buffett (BRK.A) is bullish. U.S. stocks, at 10x earnings and a 3% dividend yield, look reasonable. European stocks at 1.2x book value and a 6% dividend yield look even cheaper.

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Geoff Considine (Quantext) submits: The hedge fund business has been growing rapidly in recent years—with no end in sight. Wealthy investors are seeking alternative investments to meet their needs and hedge fund managers have an array of tools and strategies at their disposal. One of the core strategies employed by hedge funds is what is called market-neutral investing. A market-neutral portfolio is designed to deliver returns that are not impacted by the movements of the broader market. This does not mean that a market-neutral approach is low risk, however. Goldman Sachs' (GS) largest hedge fund employs market-neutral strategies and has attributed their very poor recent performance partly to this approach.

The defining objective of a market-neutral portfolio is that its returns have low correlation to the broader market. Investors use such funds as a diversifier to their other investments in equities. Low-correlation between assets improves their diversification value. In practical terms, increased diversification means that you can achieve a higher return for the total amount of portfolio risk.

Market-neutral portfolios are achieved through a range of strategies. The simplest and best-known approach to market-neutral investing is to take long and short positions in stocks so that market exposure from the long positions is offset by the short positions. There are a number of mutual funds that exploit long-short strategies and this article is a good overview for the layperson.

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