2 No-Brainer, High-Yield Stocks to Buy With $2,000 Right Now
The S&P 500 index (SNPINDEX: ^GSPC) is trading near all-time highs and has a pretty miserly 1.2% or so dividend yield. If you are an income investor, that suggests that you have your work cut out for you right now. But there are great investment options with high yields out there if you take the time to look. Two no-brainer choices today, if you have $2,000 or $20,000 to invest, are Brookfield Renewable (NYSE: BEP)(NYSE: BEPC) and Chevron (NYSE: CVX). Here's what you need to know.
Brookfield Renewable is positioned to grow
Brookfield Renewable owns a globally diversified portfolio of clean energy assets. On the geographic front, its portfolio spans across North America, South America, Europe, and Asia. On the technology front, the business has exposure to hydroelectric, solar, wind, energy storage, and nuclear power assets. It is as close to a one-stop shop as you can get in the renewable energy space.
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The interesting thing here, however, is that Brookfield Renewable is not a regulated utility. It largely sells its power under long-term contracts to others, including both companies and utilities. This actually gives it a lot of room to grow as the world increasingly shifts from carbon-based fuels toward cleaner alternatives. For example, it recently inked a deal with Microsoft to provide around 10.5 gigawatts of power that the technology giant will use to support its data center build-out. Basically, Brookfield Renewable can grow as it sees fit without having to kowtow to regulators who may put limits on its investment plans.
And this brings up another interesting fact: Brookfield Renewable is run by Brookfield Asset Management (NYSE: BAM). Brookfield Asset Management has an over-100-year history of investing in infrastructure on a global scale. And it plans to increase its clean-energy investments, where Brookfield Renewable is a key source of funding, by around 100% by 2030. Buying Brookfield Renewable lets you partner with Brookfield Asset Management on that growth.
There are two ways to buy in here. Brookfield Renewable Partners has a 5.6% yield. Brookfield Renewable Corporation has a 4.6% dividend yield. Both represent the exact same entity and have the exact same dividend payment. The yield difference is because demand for the corporate share class is higher, which makes sense given that large institutional investors are often barred from owning partnerships.
Either way you go, Brookfield Renewable appears well positioned to expand its business as the world goes green. And you can collect a fat yield that has been regularly increased if you buy in right now. A $2,000 investment will get you 75 shares of the partnership units and 60 shares of the corporate shares.
Chevron is out of favor for two reasons
Chevron is a globally diversified, integrated energy giant offering an attractive 4.7% dividend yield. The dividend has been increased for an incredible 38 consecutive years. That's incredible because oil and natural gas prices tend to be highly volatile, which means that Chevron's top and bottom lines tend to be volatile, too.
However, Chevron has an ace up its sleeve in the form of a strong balance sheet. A low level of leverage allows it to take on debt during industry downturns so it can continue to support its business and dividend. When oil prices recover, as they always have historically, it pays down debt in preparation for the next downturn. In addition to this rock-solid financial foundation, Chevron's diversified business also helps. With investments in energy production (the upstream), energy transportation (the midstream), and energy processing (the downstream), the peaks and valleys of oil prices get muted to some degree.
That said, Chevron is out of favor right now, which has led to the lofty yield. Part of the reason for that is generally weak energy prices. Those low prices are impacting the entire energy sector. But Chevron also has some company-specific issues. First, it is attempting to buy Hess, but the process has turned out to be more complicated than hoped. Second, Chevron has investments in Venezuela, a tenuous country in which to invest. Those assets have become a bit of a political football. Neither of these things is good, but they aren't likely to derail Chevron over the long term.
The currently high yield is an opportunity for investors who can think long term. You may have to suffer through some near-term lagging performance, but if you buy now, you'll get paid well for waiting around. A $2,000 investment in Chevron will get you around 13 shares.
Looking for yield, start with this pair of high yielders
With lofty yields, Brookfield Renewable and Chevron should both be attractive to dividend investors. But the real key to the story here is that both have strong businesses to support those dividends. If you think in decades and not days, these two high-yield stocks could be no-brainer additions to your portfolio right now.
Should you invest $1,000 in Brookfield Renewable right now?
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Globe and Mail
38 minutes ago
- Globe and Mail
In the AI revolution, universities are up against the wall
Mark Kingwell is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. His latest book is Question Authority: A Polemic About Trust in Five Meditations. It's convocation season. Bored graduates everywhere will be forced to listen to earnest speeches about how they should make their way in a world short on decent jobs. I've given a couple of those orations myself. Here's the one I won't be giving this year but would have if asked. Hey guys! You've probably heard that philosophers are in the habit of declaring their discipline dead. Thinkers are forever claiming that everyone before them had the wrong ideas about time, being, or knowledge. Great – it's a vibrant patricidal enterprise. But I'm here today to tell you that philosophy is dead for good this time. So is humanistic education in general, maybe academia itself. The murderous force isn't just anti-elitist, Trump-driven depredation. No, as Nietzsche said of the death of god, we have done the killing. Smartness destroys from the inside out: The AI revolution has signalled the demise of the university as we know it. After all, how do we teach undergraduates philosophy, history or anything else when it's now so easy to fake the whole process? Students still think it might be wrong, or maybe risky, to have an algorithm write their essays wholesale. But increasingly they don't see what's wrong with using programs to take notes, summarize readings and create or correct first drafts. Reading, meanwhile, is tedious and hard, and so the idea of assigning entire books – even novels – is sliding out of academic fashion. Average attentions spans have shrunk from several minutes to about 40 seconds. You won't counter that by putting Aquinas's Summa or Spinoza's Ethics on the syllabus. At the same time, these same students resent knowing that professors might use countervailing programs to grade their work. They also dislike the idea that somebody in authority might consider them cheaters. Indeed, some students now resort to surveillance-society mechanisms, once the bugbear of free citizens everywhere, to prove that they are not cheating, including YouTube videos of them composing their guaranteed-human-origin essays. So: programs for recording screen activity or documenting keystrokes are now being asked to view performative acts of being-watched. And programs for cheating on essays confront programs designed to catch cheaters but also programs designed to counter the need for human grading altogether. These countervailing programs produce and consume each other; they watch and are watched, cheat and are cheated, pursue grades and are duly graded. I'm not the first to notice that there is no further need for human middle men here. Students and professors alike are extraneous to the system. A techno-bureaucratic loop enfolds them, then snips them off as messy loose ends. We have created the ultimate state of frictionless exchange, a circulating economy of the already-thought, the banal, the pre-digested, where every Google search leads to a fabricated source that eventually bounces back to base. Peak efficiency, with net gains in eliminated boredom. Yay! So why resist assimilation? Recently I sat in a seminar organized by my colleagues to consider ways of testing students in class, as a foil to chatbot cheating. The proposed tests involved various small-scale fact-finding exercises, truncated arguments, and the logic-skills equivalent of a magazine puzzle page. One professor suggested that actual written essays should be reserved only for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students, if anyone. Fine, I suppose, but how would those upper-level students ever learn how to write in the first place, let alone write well? Forget AI essay cheating. Basic writing ability, always prone to deterioration, is now disappearing faster than map-reading skills and short-term memory. You can no longer assume that first-year students know how to compose even the most basic 'hamburger' essay (bun, lettuce, tomato, patty, bun). And still we believe – do we not? – that clear writing is the foundation of clear thought. Alas, that faith no longer seems so warranted. Writing seems more and more surplus to requirements. It can be off-loaded as a dreary chore, like so much dirty laundry sent out for cleaning. I recently wondered, not for the first time, if I had been labouring under a mistaken notion of philosophy, and teaching it, all along. If the subject can be distilled down to a roster of positions, specific argumentative moves and technical terms – which is how I believe some of my colleagues see it – then we can indeed dispense with sustained discursive engagement, and the clunky old-fashioned fraud-prone essay with it. But then, what would education be like? What would it be for? Good questions. Maybe the current proclaimed academic death-rattle is actually an opportunity to go back to first principles, inside the walls and out. In my discipline's case, the issue is not so much the end of philosophy, in other words, but the ends of philosophy. Like most teachers of the subject, I have long been conflicted about our mechanisms of assessment. Essays are a slog for everyone, even when they're legit products of individual minds. In-person final exams can control for essay cheating, most of the time, but they are a poor method of gauging the depth of philosophical insight. The old joke from Annie Hall makes the point: 'I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam,' it goes. 'I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.' Like many philosophy professors, I prefer discussion in seminars, close reading of textual passages, and face-to-face assessment over both essays and exams. I ask for short, ungraded weekly reflection papers that my students seem to enjoy writing and I certainly enjoy reading. But these small-bore tools are not scaleable for our vast budget-driven enrolments. And always, grades loom far larger than they should over the whole enterprise. Once you start questioning assessment, you slide very quickly into uncomfortable thoughts about the larger purpose of any teaching. The irony is doubled because asking 'What is the use of use?' is one of those typical philosophical moves. Updated version for the age of neo-liberal overproduction: What is the use of asking what is the use of use, when large language models can do it for you?' I admit I get impatient when, at this stage of things, people invoke some vague notion of distinctive humanness, a form of species-centric superiority. I mean those hand-wavy claims that there is something about what we humans do that is just, well, different from AI versions of things. Different and better. No AI could ever match the uniqueness of the human spirit! Well, maybe. But let's be serious: This line of argument is ideological special pleading. There are some 8.2 billion unique human souls on the planet. Yes, a minority break free of the sludge of mediocrity, and we celebrate them. We also cherish the experience of our own lives, however mundane. But we're now forced to realize that some, even many, sources of human pride can be practised as well, if not better, by non-human mechanisms. Art and poetry fall before the machines' totalizing recombinative invention. Even athletics, apparently deeply wedded to the human form, are being colonized by cyborg technology. You might think this is just griping from another worker whose sector is destined for obsolescence. True, neoliberal overproduction and dire job prospects have likely produced more philosophy teachers – and many more student essays – than the world needs. From this angle, AI's great academic replacement is just a market correction. It completes a decades-long self-inflicted irrelevance program, those thousands of punishing essays that nobody reads, the best ones published in journals that are, more and more, pay-as-you-go online boondoggles. I still think those abstruse debates are important, though, and you should too. We are at a transitional point that demands every tool of critical reflection, human or otherwise. Anxiety about the future of work and life is pitched high, for good reason. For now we are still mostly able to spot uncanny AI slop, bizarre search-engine confabulations, and bot-generated recommendations for books that have been invented by bots – presumably so that other bots can then not-read them, scrape the data for future reconstitution, and maybe submit unread book reports for academic credit somewhere. We can even, for the moment, recognize that non-bot government bans on actual books, and state-sponsored punishment of legacy liberal education, pose a threat to everyone's freedom. But I still think we are losing, in the current murk, something that only philosophy can provide. It's something that has always been posthuman in the dual sense of transcendent and transformative. I don't just mean a critical-thinking skill set, or body of facts, or even the basics of media literacy and fallacy-spotting – though these are essential tools for life. I mean, rather, the things that animate the hundreds of students who still come to our classes: the value of self-given meaning and purpose, the pleasure of being good at hard things for their sake alone, a consuming joy in the free play of imagination. A desire to flourish, and to bend the arc of history toward justice. I don't know if those things are exclusive to humans; I do know that they are threatened and in short supply among existing humans. The love of wisdom can't really be taught, for it is a turning of the soul toward the beautiful and good. You can't justify the value of that turning to someone who has not yet felt the necessary shift in value. That's the paradox of all philosophy, and of all philosophy teaching. There will be no exam after this lecture, graduates. The real test is no more, but also no less, than life itself. You are a speck of dust in an indifferent universe. Now make the most of it. Is AI dulling critical-thinking skills? As tech companies court students, educators weigh the risks Will AI go rogue? 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CTV News
42 minutes ago
- CTV News
The success of a key NATO summit is in doubt after Spain rejects a big hike in defence spending
U.S. President Donald Trump, centre, stops to talk with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, left, and Turkiye's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, right, as they attend a meeting of the North Atlantic Council during a summit of heads of state and government at NATO headquarters in Brussels on July 11, 2018. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais) BRUSSELS — The success of a key NATO summit hung in the balance on Friday, after Spain announced that it cannot raise the billions of dollars needed to meet a new defence investment pledge demanded by U.S. President Donald Trump. Trump and his NATO counterparts are meeting for two days in the Netherlands from next Tuesday. He insists that U.S. allies should commit to spending at least 5% of gross domestic product, but that requires investment at an unprecedented scale. Trump has cast doubt over whether the U.S. would defend allies that spend too little. Setting the spending goal would be a historic decision. 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He's under growing pressure to call an early election. In response to the letter, Rutte's office said only that 'discussions among allies on a new defence investment plan are ongoing.' NATO's top civilian official had been due to table a new proposal on Friday to try to break the deadlock. The U.S. and French envoys had also been due to update reporters about the latest developments ahead of the summit but postponed their briefings. Rutte and many European allies are desperate to resolve the problem by Tuesday so that Trump does not derail the summit, as he did during his first term at NATO headquarters in 2018. Budget boosting After Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, NATO allies agreed that 2% of GDP should be the minimum they spend on their military budgets. But NATO's new plans for defending its own territory against outside attack require investment of at least 3%. Spain agreed to those plans in 2023. The 5% goal is made up of two parts. The allies would agree to hike pure defence spending to 3.5% of GDP. A further 1.5% would go to upgrade roads, bridges, ports and airfields so that armies can better deploy, and to prepare societies for future attacks. Mathematically, 3.5 plus 1.5 equals Trump's 5%. But a lot is hiding behind the figures and details of what kinds of things can be included remain cloudy. Countries closest to Russia, Belarus and Ukraine have all agreed to the target, as well as nearby Germany, Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands, which is hosting the June 24-25 summit. The Netherlands estimates that NATO's defence plans would force it to dedicate at least 3.5% to core defence spending. That means finding an additional 16 billion to 19 billion euros (US$18 billion to $22 billion). Supplying arms and ammunition to Ukraine, which Spain does, will also be included as core defence spending. NATO estimates that the U.S. spent around 3.2% of GDP on defence last year. 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Many allies haven't yet hit the 2% target, although most will this year, and they had a decade to get there. So an incentive is required. The date of 2032 has been floated as a deadline. That's far shorter than previous NATO targets, but military planners estimate that Russian forces could be capable of launching an attack on an ally within 5-10 years. The U.S. insists that it cannot be an open-ended pledge, and that a decade is too long. Still, Italy says it wants 10 years to hit the 5% target. Another issue is how fast spending should be ramped up. 'I have a cunning plan for that,' Rutte said. He wants the allies to submit annual plans that lay out how much they intend to increase spending by. The reasons for the spending hike For Europe, Russia's war on Ukraine poses an existential threat. A major rise in sabotage, cyberattacks and GPS jamming incidents is blamed on Moscow. European leaders are girding their citizens for the possibility of more. The United States also insists that China poses a threat. But for European people to back a hike in national defence spending, their governments require acknowledgement that the Kremlin remains NATO's biggest security challenge. The billions required for security will be raised by taxes, going into debt, or shuffling money from other budgets. But it won't be easy for many, as Spain has shown. On top of that, Trump has made things economically tougher by launching a global tariff war — ostensibly for U.S. national security reasons — something America's allies find hard to fathom. Lorne Cook, The Associated Press
CTV News
42 minutes ago
- CTV News
Telegram founder Pavel Durov says all his 100+ children will receive share of his estate
Telegram CEO Pavel Durov said he didn't want his children to fight over his estate. (Thomas Samson/AFP/Getty Images via CNN Newsource) Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of instant messaging app Telegram, plans to leave his fortune to the more than 100 children he has fathered. The Russian-born tech tycoon has revealed that his estate will be split between his six children from relationships and the scores of others whom he fathered through sperm donation. In a wide-ranging interview published Thursday in French political magazine Le Point, 40-year-old Durov revealed that he does not differentiate between his legal children with three different women and those conceived with the sperm he donated. 'They are all my children and will all have the same rights! I don't want them to tear each other apart after my death,' he said, after revealing that he recently wrote his will. Durov revealed the number of children he has fathered on his social media last year. He said a doctor told him that it was his 'civic duty' to donate his 'high quality donor material,' which he did over the course of 15 years. According to Bloomberg, Durov is worth an estimated US$13.9 billion, but he dismissed such estimates as 'theoretical,' telling Le Point: 'Since I'm not selling Telegram, it doesn't matter. I don't have this money in a bank account. My liquid assets are much lower – and they don't come from Telegram: they come from my investment in bitcoin in 2013.' Regardless, his children will have a long wait for their inheritance. He said: 'I decided that my children would not have access to my fortune until a period of 30 years has elapsed, starting from today. I want them to live like normal people, to build themselves up alone, to learn to trust themselves, to be able to create, not to be dependent on a bank account. I want to specify that I make no difference between my children: there are those who were conceived naturally and those who come from my sperm donations.' When asked why he has written his will now, Durov, who lives in Dubai, said: 'My work involves risks – defending freedoms earns you many enemies, including within powerful states. I want to protect my children, but also the company I created, Telegram. I want Telegram to forever remain faithful to the values I defend.' Telegram, which has more than a billion monthly users, is known for its high-level encryption and limited oversight on what its users post. Last year, Durov was arrested in Paris on charges relating to a host of crimes, including allegations that his platform was complicit in aiding money launderers, drug traffickers and people spreading child pornography. Durov, who is Telegram's sole shareholder, has denied the charges, which he described as 'absurd.' 'Just because criminals use our messaging service among many others doesn't make those who run it criminals,' he told the French magazine. Lianne Kolirin, CNN
