Author: user

Image source: Getty Images For those who are looking to make money while they sleep, dividend shares can be a great choice. But what separates the good ones from the great ones? According to Warren Buffett, the best stocks are ones that pay out more to investors over time. Finding these can be the difference between doing well and earning huge passive income. Buffett’s secret sauce Coca-Cola and American Express have been two of Berkshire Hathaway’s best income investments. And in the 2023 shareholder letter, Buffett outlined why this has been the case. According to Buffett, the reason is that…

Image source: Getty Images Buying FTSE 100 dividend stocks can be a great way of earning a second income over time. In the best cases, the cash keeps coming in whether the stock market goes up or down.  One in my portfolio at the moment is Diageo (LSE:DGE). But as the dividend yield gets close to 5%, should I start to worry about my investment or put my foot down and buy more? Dividends Over the last 12 months, Diageo has returned 77.69p per share in dividends. That means someone needs 15,466 shares to earn £12,000 a year, or £1,000…

There’s been plenty of chatter about a looming stock market crash lately, and some investors have been moving into cash. Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, for example, had cash holdings of $382bn in Q3! Obviously, I don’t have anywhere near $382bn in my humble Stocks and Shares ISA. But I do have some cash for a couple of stocks, were a market meltdown to occur. Here are two I’d love to add to my portfolio at cheaper prices. Nasdaq stock According to McKinsey, the global space economy is projected to reach $1.8trn by 2035, up from $613bn in 2024. This will…

Image source: Getty Images The FTSE 100 is home to three stocks in the clothing industry, albeit ones that operate at different price points in the market. One of them is Burberry Group (LSE:BRBY), which targets more affluent shoppers. However, it’s not been a great time for those selling into the luxury goods market. In its 2025 annual report, Capri Holdings, which last week (2 December) announced that it had sold Versace to Prada, gloomily listed 13 factors — ranging from inflation to war — that had “created a challenging retail environment”. Against this backdrop, Burberry’s share price is now…

Image source: Getty Images Is now a good time to buy stocks? High valuations have investors starting to take a second look at artificial intelligence (AI) investments and this has wider implications for share prices. Given the focus on AI at the moment, I thought I’d see what ChatGPT made of the situation. It didn’t give a particularly insightful answer, but maybe that’s what I should have expected. AI insight ChatGPT’s answer was a bit strange. Its general view was that short-term traders should sit tight, but that long-term investors might want to consider buying.  The basic idea is that…

Image source: Getty Images Does it make sense to build up a retirement portfolio with lots of high-yield shares in it, aiming to pile up loads of dividends before retiring? The answer depends on a few factors. Every investor is different and so the objectives and indeed timeframe for their retirement portfolio will likely reflect that. When a company pays out a dividend, it does so at the opportunity cost of spending that money on other things. For a company in a mature industry like tobacco, other strategic spending opportunities may be limited. But a growth stock with huge untapped…

Image source: Getty Images With dividend taxes rising and ISA allowances falling, the Self-Invested Personal Pension (SIPP) is becoming increasingly important. Offering a blend of tax advantages and free government cash, investors have an excellent chance to build a decent passive income. Naturally, opinions will differ on what constitutes a ‘decent’ income in retirement. But I believe Pensions UK research is a good starting point — this implies a single person needs £43,900 a year (excluding tax) to retire in comfort. That works out at roughly £3,658 a month. So how large would your SIPP have to be to generate…

AI is delivering real productivity gains across data-rich sectors, yet today’s investment surge is unfolding through highly concentrated capital flows and unprecedented spending on chips, data centers, and cloud infrastructure. At the same time, a growing share of reported growth depends on circular financing loops between chipmakers, cloud providers, and AI developers. These practices — like those of past market bubbles — can inflate demand signals, distort revenue quality, and increase the fragility of a market driven by a small group of firms. For financial analysts, assessing how these forces shape cash-flow durability, valuations, and balance-sheet resilience is critical to…

Image source: Getty Images FTSE 250 terrestrial and digital media firm ITV (LSE: ITV) looks highly undervalued to me. It also delivers an annual dividend yield of over 6%, although this could go down as well as up. By my reckoning, this means investors could bank major passive income returns while waiting for any price rise. To me then, there are two key questions. First, what is the stock’s true worth? And second, does the dividend yield look sustainable? Fair value? The best way I have found to ascertain any share’s fair value is the discounted cash flow model. This…

British American Tobacco (LSE: BATS) was one of a clutch of FTSE 100 stocks I picked up in early 2020. With early retirement in mind, I focused on high‑dividend shares to fund the fun of future downtime. Back then, the tobacco and nicotine substitutes manufacturer was yielding 8.8%. Since then, the share price has climbed strongly, compressing the yield, but I am well ahead on both income and capital. So, what are the prospects for further gains? A bargain-basement bonanza I bought £10,000 worth of the stock in late March of that year. That secured me 417 shares at the…