It has become harder and harder for income investors to find reasonably safe investments that pay a reasonable dividend (or interest).

In the last three months, while virtually all income producing vehicles we follow have gotten murdered, the Electric Utilities sector has been fairly insulated from the devastation.

Much has been written on the Canadian Oil and Gas Royalty Trusts in the last year or two. Much of what has been written was in regards to the taxation of the Trusts beginning in 2011. Generally, we believe this is overblown hype and has simply served to drive prices of the shares to extreme lows.

The price levels of all the Trusts have been beaten down not only because of the 2011 taxation issue, but also because of the sharp declines in crude oil and natural gas. We ask the question: how low does a Trust price have to fall and how high do the yields have to rise to make the risk/reward adequate to begin purchasing some of these Trusts?

The recent market turnoil has presented a multitude of opportunies for buying high yielding, quality securities. We are talking about investment grade issues that fell by as much as 70% during October and have recently started to recover to a more appropriate level.

Lately we have been researching the securities of Lincoln National Corp (LNC). Lincoln National is a large life insurance company which also offers annuities, mutual funds and asset management services. The companys common shares as well as its preferreds and exchange traded debt issues took a servere beating during the month of October.