HOW TO MAKE A FORTUNE ON THE STOCK MARKET

Okay, I lied. I have no idea about how to make a fortune on the stock market, but I do know where you can get a lot of information about stocks. If you know something about a stock before you buy it, you’ll be less likely to lose your shirt on a bad investment.

There are lots of sources of information about investments on the internet. I’m going to use Yahoo Finance, but there are many others, including AOL finance that are just as good.

First we have to pick a stock to research. I don’t have a lot of money to invest. I don’t expect to get in at the bottom of the next Google or Facebook, so I am going to look for stocks with a high dividend yield. One of the things available on Yahoo Finance is a stock screener, so I can use that to find my high dividend stock. I am particularly interested in a particular type of stock, real estate investment trust (REIT). REITs have to pay out 90 percent of their profit as dividends to their investors, so they tend to have really a really high yield . These instruments make different kinds of investments in real estate. Some own rental properties or hotels. Others own medical buildings, including nursing homes. Still others specialize in mortgages.

The company I want to research is CorEnergy Infrastructure Trust (CORR).  That sounds like an energy company, but it is a REIT. The real estate it owns hold pipelines and storage tanks. If one of the big petroleum companies want to send some oil through the pipeline or store it in one of the tanks, they have to pay CORR for the use of their facilities.

I got this information from Yahoo Finance, which has a company profile, news, press releases, message boards, and all kinds of statistical information, going back several years. Right now (June 22 at 3:15 p.m.) it is selling for $27.97 a share. On May 13 it paid a quarterly dividend of $0.75 a share.

Things in the news affect the prices of all stocks. At the end of 2015 the price of these shares dropped to about $10.00 Early in 2016 the company decided to make a reverse split of 15:1. In other words, if you owned 150 shares, after the reverse split you would have only 10 shares. At the same time the company raised the dividend. Evidently they hoped that these actions would raise the share price. At first the stock went down even further, but with the high dividend payment, the price started moving up, reaching $23 in mid-spring. Then word came out that one of the companies that used CORR’s pipelines was going bankrupt. The stock headed back down.

But wait! The company didn’t go bankrupt after all, and CorEnergy headed back up. As of today, as we saw, it is selling at almost $28 a share.

If you are interested in numbers, Yahoo Finance has lots of them, including price/earnings ratio, the day’s price range, and the price range for the last year ($10.90 - $33.20). The site is full of valuable information for investors, including analysts’ opinions of the stock.  

The price of the stock has more than doubled in the last four or five months. That sounds good, but the price could just as easily go down. However, I find the dividend yield interesting: $0.75 per quarter or $3.00 per share over a year. At the current price of the stock ($27.97), the dividend yield is over 10 percent. If you bought 100 shares of CORR, you would earn $300 a year in dividends, as long as the dividend stayed the same.