Check Out These Unusual Funds That Could Double Your Dividends

Fee-obsessed investors continue to pile into exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

Don’t follow them.

Because there’s another—much less popular—group of funds that will hand you much better returns (and double the dividend payouts). And swapping your ETFs for them is easy.

I’m talking about closed-end funds (CEFs). (If you’re not familiar with CEFs, click here to check out a primer I recently wrote on them.)

Now even though I just said CEFs are less popular than ETFs, that doesn’t mean they’re totally ignored. The truth is, they’re getting more attention from investors of late, for reasons I’ll dive into in just a moment.

With average gains of 13.8%, there’s no doubt CEFs are soaring.

And they’re doing it with incredible diversification—almost all CEFs hold more than 100 investments, including stocks, bonds and even real estate. That gives them more protection from a market downturn than you get with ETFs, which partly explains why investors are taking notice.

But the real reason CEFs are moving into the limelight is simpler than that: they’re destroying their ETF cousins. Compare five ETFs investing in similar asset classes as the 5 indexes above: