I once wrote that GAIN trades between $9 and $12. I still believe this is true, but GAIN has been trading above $12 for quite some time now. At what point do I give up on $12 and accept $13? $14? $15? Usually, I’m worried about the other direction. If GAIN fell to $8, I’d probably be scooping up cheap shares because that yield would be ridiculous. At $12.51, I wouldn’t exactly call GAIN cheap anymore. Having said that, it is important to factor in the special dividends GAIN pays because those extra payments may push that annual 6.5% yield up to 7.0%.

When I started the monthly dividend portfolio, my rule was that I did not invest in dividend stocks yielding less than 7%. However, I strayed away from this law by adding LTC, yielding as low as 4.5%. This, by the way, is still a ridiculously high yield. A safe dividend stock would probably sit closer to 2-3%. However, I’m not trying to be safe, I’m trying to be rich.

If you take a look at the Yield column in the table above, you can see that it has steadily fallen over the past few months. GAIN yielding under 7% is hard for me to stomach because I’ve been buying it for three years now and most of my holdings were purchased around $9. The saving grace is the special dividend. Periodically, GAIN will sell all of its interest in a company and distribute the capital gains to the shareholders. This is taxed differently than the dividend and only comes maybe twice a year, but in order to get the true annual yield of GAIN, you need to factor in the special dividends.