MoneyWeek magazine issue 605

A bubble in simplicity

I wrote earlier this week about the possibility that we might be at the beginning of a bubble in simplicity – in the kind of high-quality, dividend-paying stocks that everyone now appears to agree are the best things to invest in for the long term. The story is continued by Jane Fuller in the FT.

Investing for income, she says, has “not been so fashionable since the first half of the last century”, when the yield on equities was generally higher than that on government bonds (as it is now). These days, baskets of higher-yielding stocks are regular outpeformers and it is slowly becoming clear that the 1980s and 1990s were very unusual in the way that they provided most of their total return from capital gain rather than income.

The question, of course, is what happens next?