Excerpt from Raymond James strategist Jeffrey Saut's latest essay, published Monday (October 6th):

The call for this week: Well, we arrived at the office at 5:30 a.m. [on Monday] only to see the S&P 500 preopening futures down 33 points amid news out of Europe of an expanding banking/credit crisis. Monday morning’s swoon comes on the back of Friday’s Flop, which turned out to be yet another Dow Theory “sell signal” like the one we wrote about last November.

Many income investors are looking for monthly dividend payments to support their income during retirement. Other pre-retirement investors want monthly dividend stocks for their IRAs for faster compounding.

Note that keeping the dividend unchanged one year out of ten is not acceptable and would cause the company to drop off of the “dividend achiever” list. Such a company would need to re-start the 10-year cycle all over again to get back onto the list. There is also a liquidity requirement- the two month average daily trading (price*volume) must exceed $500K.

Mergent is a spinoff of Moody’s that was acquired in 2004 by Xinhua Finance, a leading Chinese financial and media company. Mergent has compiled historical information on “dividend achievers” since 1979, and has built a growing business out of licensing several versions of the dividend achiever indexes to other companies that market mutual funds, closed end funds and ETF’s.

This list is now up to 150 different stocks, CEFs, REITs, floating rate funds, and oil income funds [such as Canadian royalty trusts], all of which are traded on the New York Stock Exchange or the American Stock Exchange. I've added over twenty new securities since the year-end update, reposted the yields, kept the readers' recommendations of sorting by yield with the highest first, and identifying the Canadian companies [due to tax withholding issues].

Due to requests from readers, I have sorted the list by yield, from highest to lowest. In addition, I have identified the Canadian trusts due to the tax withholding issue which can significantly affect the yield, especially with regard to holding these Canadian Oil Income Trusts in retirement plans (they all trade in the U.S.). The list shows the name of the stock, the stock market symbol, the yield, and if the stock is Canadian.

For anyone who researches their own investments, the closed-end funds would probably be preferable because they won’t have the big sales charge and the recurring 12b-1 fees of the Van Kampen fund. Plus, once again, closed-end funds have the advantage of a stable asset base on which the calls can be written.

Nature of the beast: Closed-end funds are offered at a premium to NAV at their IPOs; the premium represents the compensation to the underwriters, although few retail buyers understand this. Afterward, closed-ends frequently fall to discounts in the aftermarket.

Lack of investor understanding: Wachovia Securities analyst Mariana Bush says, "We think investors are selling their funds regardless of their NAV performance, to get rid of holdings whose behavior they cannot fully understand."

Wall Street maneuvers: A 1994 study by the Wharton School of Finance suggested that "enterprising" pros sell these funds to a "less informed" public. More often than not, these premiums disappeared when the underwriters withdrew so-called price support techniques after the offering, leaving the small investors holding the bag... Thomas J. Herzfeld places the blame for the current depressed prices squarely on Wall Street. "The underwriters pumped out whatever they could sell leaving no demand for these shares in the aftermarket."

Overly-high risk in pursuit of high yields: "Most of these funds have little or no chance of returning their eight, nine, ten percent yields without depleting their respective net-asset values," says another Chicago options trader.