The Retirement Income Report Issue #4
Tools to research and track your investments
📰 The Retirement Income Report — Issue #4
Welcome to Issue #4 of The Retirement Income Report! This week, we’ll review portfolio results for April and year-to-date performance. I’ll also walk you through the tools I use to research and track my investments, and we’ll wrap up with a new Fund Spotlight, which is especially interesting if you're curious about Bitcoin exposure in your income strategy.
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💼 Portfolio Performance Update
Let’s start with how the portfolio is performing so far in 2025:
📉 YTD Performance through April: -1.71%
While being in the red is never ideal, I’m relatively happy with this result given the broader market turbulence this year.📈 Current Dividend Yield on Cost: 9.89%
Despite a late-month market recovery, dividend yield remains high. Closed-end funds (CEFs) tend to lag a bit when markets move rapidly, likely due to the income-focused mindset of most CEF investors. They aren’t usually short-term traders.
🔍 Tools for Researching Closed-End Funds
Due to the low focus on CEFs in the market, there are few sites that provide great information on funds. My favorite resource for analyzing CEFs is CEFConnect.com, a tool created by Nuveen. It’s free, and offers a wealth of information including:
Fund screeners to explore investment ideas.
Portfolio creation and alerts
Deep-dive data on individual funds
By typing in the symbol of a fund you get detailed information all in one place. Click this BSTZ Link and you can see the page for BSTZ — BlackRock Science and Technology Term Trust, which I spotlighted a few weeks ago.
This is what the page looks like with tabs across the page showing different groups of information.
Overview: Shows pricing data, historical highs/lows, dividend rate, and payment frequency. You’ll also see a performance chart that can go back to the fund’s start date.
Fund Basics: Includes investment objectives, capital structure, leverage usage, management team, and inception date.
Pro Tip: Pay attention to the amount of leverage. While it can enhance yield and performance, rising interest rates (like in 2023) can hurt returns due to higher borrowing costs. BSTZ is less than 1% but I see funds with leverage of over 30% and I usually stay away from those or limit my investment.
Distributions/Dividends: View detailed dividend history from the past year and all the way back to inception. This is where I check for consistency — a major theme from last week’s post. BSTZ has paid a dividend every month since August 2019.
Pricing Information: Shows the premium or discount to NAV (Net Asset Value). You can see it for this year or since the fund started. This is important because CEFs allow you to purchase assets for less than their value most of the time.
For example: If a fund’s NAV is $10 but it trades at $9, that’s a 10% discount — you’re buying $10 worth of assets for $9. A nice deal, but remember, you might eventually sell at a discount too. Some funds do trade at a premium at times and a few all of the time but if the premium is more than a few % point over I usually stay away.
BSTZ’s discount increased to -9.74% early in April but this week is around -6.50% as technology stocks have recovered the last few weeks.
Performance: Includes YTD as well as long term return data up to 20 years if the fund has been active that long. This is another great data point for consistency.
BSTZ YTD is -10.38% as of 4/30.
Slightly worse than the S & P 500 -5.1% and Nasdaq -9.51%.
Since the yield on the dividend is over 14% right now, I am not worried at all about that short term number.
Portfolio Characteristics: This is where you will find top holdings, sector exposure, country allocation and the types of assets owned by the fund. Top holdings detail is important as it shows you exactly what you are buying in the fund.
📊 How I Track My Investments
I’ve searched far and wide for the perfect portfolio tracker and never quite found it. So, I built my own spreadsheet that had everything I wanted to keep up with and I can update whenever I need. There are plenty of great investments or portfolio tracking tools online and most are free or have free versions available.
Some options to explore:
Brokerage tools — Fidelity and Vanguard, both offer solid tracking features.
Web-based tools — Yahoo Finance, Investing.com but there are many others.
Apps — Quicken Simplifi or Monarch Money are popular for budgets and investing.
Newer option — Snowball Analytics
I’ve been using this one for a little while and like it. It’s great for tracking portfolios and dividend income, with both free and paid tiers. It’s still new and some problems have shown up from time to time in the data, but they are very responsive in fixing issues.
Everyone's needs are different, so try a few and see what fits best. If you’re more hands-on like me, a customized spreadsheet might still be the way to go.
🌟 Fund Spotlight: ProShares Bitcoin ETF (BITO)
This week’s Fund Spotlight dives into a fund with Bitcoin exposure — offering high yield and a contrarian play on digital assets. You may have read about gold prices going higher recently. I found out about BITO from Brett Owens at the DividendSwingTrader Newsletter. China has been buying more gold recently instead of dollars, so the price has run up both from that and the ongoing tariff actions. But gold is no longer the only place to hold value anymore. Digital assets could be a focus, especially Bitcoin since major institutions on Wall Street have been adopting it over the last year.
BITO is an easy way to participate in Bitcoin and while I would not buy up to my 5% limit I do like the yield here:
· Average dividend yield YTD 24%
· May dividend $0.544737/share up from $.361007 in April.
· Past 12 month yield: 67%
Yes, 67%. That’s eye-popping to say the least and why I say this is a higher risk holding.
📚 Wrapping Up
Hope you find this week’s issue interesting. Please let me know if you have any questions!
💡 Special Offer:
Anyone starting a paid subscription. Starting this week if you want a customized spreadsheet of your own to monitor or follow your investment portfolio, I will be happy to work with you to create one for your needs. I can share with you some of the sheets I have used in the past and create exactly what you need to monitor your investments. This can be done by video call or email, whichever is best for you. If you subscribe to a paid subscription, I will contact you to set up a time for us to get started. Thanks for your support!
Next week, in addition to the usual portfolio review and fund spotlight, I will discuss focusing on income from dividends while still trying for growth to keep my investment portfolio amount growing throughout retirement.