There are plenty of stocks, including closed end funds, real estate trusts, master limited partnerships, and oil royalty trusts, which pay their dividends monthly. Lots of advantages are available with receiving monthly dividends including acceleration the investors' return of capital, faster compounding if the dividends are reinvested, provides a steadier cash flow, generally lower volatility, and some of the yields are partially or completely tax free.

At WallStreetNewsNetwork.com, they provide a downloadable list of over 300 monthly monthly dividend stocks. Here are a few examples of some with yields over 9%:

Still, not all is bad. The good news, Barron's says, is that governments recognize the threat and are responding with unprecedented force, commodity prices are way down, and Buffett (BRK.A) is bullish. U.S. stocks, at 10x earnings and a 3% dividend yield, look reasonable. European stocks at 1.2x book value and a 6% dividend yield look even cheaper.

The defining objective of a market-neutral portfolio is that its returns have low correlation to the broader market. Investors use such funds as a diversifier to their other investments in equities. Low-correlation between assets improves their diversification value. In practical terms, increased diversification means that you can achieve a higher return for the total amount of portfolio risk.

Market-neutral portfolios are achieved through a range of strategies. The simplest and best-known approach to market-neutral investing is to take long and short positions in stocks so that market exposure from the long positions is offset by the short positions. There are a number of mutual funds that exploit long-short strategies and this article is a good overview for the layperson.

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.

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.