The other day, I sort of surprised myself by commenting on how pleased I am with the current investments on my Dividend Hunter recommendations list. Thinking for a moment, I realize that it appears the challenges of the last year and a half have resulted in the highest quality portfolio list in the history of the Dividend Hunter.

The pandemic’s start turned into a huge stress test for different types of high yield investments. These groups all fell harder and farther than the broader stock market averages. For six months, I scrambled to gather enough information to decide which high-yield stocks would be able to continue to pay dividends and which would see long-term to permanent impairment of their ability to pay cash to shareholders.

For example, individual preferred stocks turned into a great opportunity as the high-yield sectors crashed. Just today, I saw this chart in my Schwab account.

I case you can’t see it, for a moment, this preferred stock traded for less than $7.00.

During the summer of 2021, I researched and added a list of individual preferred shares to the Dividend Hunter list for the first time. Even as the preferred share prices recovered, I discovered I liked owning preferred shares, with their attractive combination of stability (outside of pandemics) and high yields. I now include for Dividend Hunter subscribers a list of recommended preferred stocks. The group has an average yield of over 7%.

ETFs that use a covered call strategy to produce income were another group that I turned to in 2020. These funds use broad-based or relatively stable underlying assets, indexes, or ETFs and use a call selling strategy to generate income. The Nasdaq 100 Covered Call ETF (QYLD) was my first recommendation from this investment type. The Nasdaq index outperformed in 2020, and QYLD let my subscribers earn double-digit returns from monthly dividends.

Over the past year, I have added three more covered call funds to the Dividend Hunter list. The four together provide diversified coverage of a broad swath of the investment universe.

With years of experience recommending high-yield investments, I know the Dividend Hunter list will always be in a state of evolution. No matter its evolutionary phase, however, the recommendations list will allow investors to put together a darn profitable high-yield portfolio.