Bah! Humbug! Beware Of These 'Sucker Yields'

I know it’s Black Friday, and that means that many investors will be out shopping for bargains today. It’s really tempting these days to jump into the fray and load up on some extremely cheap REITs, because the signs are everywhere.

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Yet, with all the excitement surrounding this festive holiday season, I am going to be taking a much more conservative approach, not despising REITs but the dividend yields that are just too good to be true.
That’s fine, because my job as a REIT analyst is to call out the REITs that I refer to as “sucker yields,” and even shout out “Bah! Humbug!” much like the fictional character Ebenezer Scrooge from the classic Charles Dickens novel A Christmas Carol.
Oftentimes, I must be critical when I see a flaw in a company’s business model, much like when shopping for bargains, as Warren Buffett has said, “Price is what you pay, value is what you get.”
When you purchase shares in a high-yielding stock, you are essentially getting (in the simplest form) a discounted present value of future cash flows. This is almost like scrambling over to get the last remaining TV set at Best Buy - you become emotionally charged, almost manic depressive, causing unjustified panic. Then, when you get home, you find out that the TV set was not what you expected. Frank J. Williams said it best in his book If You Must Speculate, Learn The Rules:
“People of the dupe type are... Read more