Steven Bavaria is somewhat of an outlier in that he had his investing epiphany only after retiring from a long career in the financial services space. Following a five decade career at top financial institutions - he worked at the Bank of Boston, where he handled international credit workouts and at Standard & Poor's, where he introduced ratings to the leveraged loan market - Steven started reading articles on Seeking Alpha in the site's early days.
Enamored with Seeking Alpha's growing dividend growth community, he painstakingly developed his own unique set of DGI strategies, resulting in what he terms The Income Factory. "The Income Factory is as much an attitude towards investing as it is a strategy," Steven explains early in our conversation. "Ford builds a factory to produce automobiles. No one at the company thinks about what the factory's resale value is the day after it's built... they think about how they can make it more productive year after year." This is the same attitude Steven recommends income investors take with their portfolios.
Steven took his more than 10 years of refining his approach to investing, including more than 100 articles he submitted to Seeking Alpha, and distilled it into a book-length treatment of the subject. The Income Factory: An Investor’s Guide to Consistent Lifetime Returns was the #1 new release in Amazon's Investment category when it came out in March. Steven favors CEFs as well as some ETFs in his own portfolios. He was generous enough to discuss the book and his reaction to the Covid-19 market panic on the latest episode of Let's Talk ETFs.
Show Notes
3:30 - Steven's initial approach to investing and how it has changed over time
9:30 - The Income Factory approach to investing explained
15:00 - How does the Income Factory approach help investors overcome counterproductive behavioral investing tendencies?
19:15 - What are some other advantages of the strategy?
23:45 - Using the demise of Washington Mutual as an example, how do you create a portfolio to withstand the loss of one or two solid stocks?
30:45 - One of Steven's favorite ETFs: The Amplify High Yield ETF (YYY)
36:00 - Some of Steven's favorite CEFs (FOF) (XFLT) (ECC) (OXLC) (JQC) (ACP) (OCCI): Why the focus on CLOs?
46:30 - Steven's recommendations to a new investor looking to build an "Income Factory" portfolio
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