It is a difficult time to find attractive stocks if you are a dividend investor. The S&P 500 index (^GSPC 0.05%) is trading near all-time highs and offering a historically tiny dividend yield of roughly 1%. That’s simply too low a number to be interesting.

Don’t fear, if you do a little digging, you can still find attractive high-yield stocks. Three strong investment candidates today are Enterprise Products Partners (EPD 0.73%), Realty Income (O +1.74%), and PepsiCo (PEP +1.34%). Here’s why these high-yielders, with yields of up to 5.9%, should be on your radar today.

Enterprise Products Partners: A high-yield middleman

Enterprise Products Partners may seem like an odd suggestion, given that it operates in the energy sector. The geopolitical conflict in the Middle East has upended that sector. However, the master limited partnership’s (MLP’s) lofty 5.9% yield is backed by a toll-taker business, not high energy prices. The cash flows backing the distribution come from the fees it collects for moving energy around the world. The price of what is being moved isn’t really all that important to the MLP or its ability to cover its distribution.

Notably, the distribution has been increased annually for 27 years despite oil prices rising and falling dramatically over that span. Moreover, Enterprise’s distributable cash flow covers its distribution by a very healthy 1.7x. There’s little reason to worry about a distribution cut, since the MLP’s $5.3 billion in capital investment plans suggest that more slow-and-steady growth is highly likely. And that, in turn, should mean more distribution increases.

Enterprise Products Partners

Today’s Change

(-0.73%) $-0.27

Current Price

$36.57

Key Data Points

Market Cap

$80B

Day’s Range

$36.41 – $37.05

52wk Range

$30.01 – $40.16

Volume

3.4M

Avg Vol

4.2M

Gross Margin

13.45%

Dividend Yield

5.94%

Realty Income: A boring story that just keeps paying

Realty Income is a large net-lease real estate investment trust (REIT). It predominantly owns single-tenant retail properties for which the tenant is responsible for most property-level costs. While any single property is high risk, since there’s only one tenant, the overall portfolio risk is very low, given the over 15,500 properties Realty Income owns. The diversification story gets even better when you consider that the REIT owns assets across North America and Europe. It is built from the ground up to be a reliable dividend stock.

So dividend investors considering the stock’s lofty 5.4% yield shouldn’t eye the dividend with trepidation. In fact, the dividend has been increased annually for 31 years. And while the adjusted funds from operations payout ratio may sound high at roughly 70%, that’s actually a strong figure for a net-lease REIT. By law, REITs must pay out 90% of their taxable earnings to avoid corporate-level taxation. Essentially, REIT’s like Realty Income are designed to transfer large sums of cash to shareholders.

Today’s Change

(1.74%) $1.08

Current Price

$63.12

Key Data Points

Market Cap

$58B

Day’s Range

$62.40 – $63.26

52wk Range

$55.86 – $67.94

Volume

8.3M

Avg Vol

5.9M

Gross Margin

50.46%

Dividend Yield

5.22%

PepsiCo: A reliable Dividend King that’s on sale

When it comes to reliable dividend stocks, the creme de la creme are Dividend Kings. Only companies that have increased their dividends annually for 50+ years get to claim the crown. PepsiCo, one of the world’s largest consumer staples companies, is a Dividend King, and it offers a well-above-market yield of 4.1%.

Today’s Change

(1.34%) $1.87

Current Price

$141.39

Key Data Points

Market Cap

$191B

Day’s Range

$140.20 – $142.14

52wk Range

$128.11 – $171.48

Volume

9.7M

Avg Vol

7.3M

Gross Margin

54.22%

Dividend Yield

4.12%

PepsiCo is out of favor right now because growth has been slow, and changing buying habits and food guidelines have investors worried about the future. However, the Dividend King has adjusted to shifting market dynamics before, and there’s no reason to believe it won’t do so again this time around. Meanwhile, its price-to-sales, price-to-earnings, and price-to-book ratios are all below their five-year averages. This reliable, high-yield dividend stock looks like a bargain.

You don’t need to take on big risks to get big yields

Every investment comes with risk, but on the risk spectrum, Enterprise, Realty Income, and PepsiCo all come in at the low end. And yet they still offer yields that are dramatically higher than the market. If you are looking for dividend stocks in today’s low-yield market, you should consider putting each of these three stocks on your short list.

If you’ll recall, Eisman identified that a housing bubble was building in 2006 and 2007, fueled by an explosion in the issuance of “teaser-rate,” sub-prime mortgages, and that a crash was imminent. He famously seized the moment by shorting the home-loan market big time, a move that greatly profited both the trader and his firm FrontPoint Partners, a subsidiary of Morgan Stanley. Michael Lewis made Eisman a Wall Street legend by chronicling his exploits in his 2010 bestseller The Big Short. In the 2015 film version, Steve Carrell played the famously cranky, contrarian (re-named “Mark Baum”), while Marisa Tomei portrayed his wife and co-skeptic, former J.P. Morgan analyst Valerie Feigen (“Cynthia Baum”). Today, Eisman hosts the weekly podcast “The Real Eisman Playbook,” a program I highly recommend as much for its rollicking mockery of the group think that dominates the sell-side stock community as its sharp insights on economic trends and knack at nailing the basics that over time, drive outstanding returns to investors.

In a half-hour phone call, Eisman skewered the latest case where he reckons that hype and hysteria are fogging minds—and it’s hardly surprising that his new target’s none other than the SpaceX phenomenon. “SpaceX has the revenues of Kellogg’s, which makes Froot Loops, which I love, but no one is going out of their way to buy Froot Loops,” he declares. (The Ferrero Group of Italy bought Kellogg’s cereal business; Ferrero’s 2025 revenues of $21 billion are indeed close to SpaceX’s $19 billion.) “SpaceX stock’s being valued at over 100 times revenue, whereas no company of any size has ever had that kind of valuation. By comparison, Palantir is at 50x.” Eisman relates that Elon Musk plans to make money from ventures that only exit in the fictional world. “I grew up reading a lot of sci-fi, a ton of it, I’ve read it all,” says Eisman. “Musk and Silicon Valley grew up on it, too. The difference is, Musk and the SpaceX crew take it seriously!”

Eisman notes that a particular source of riches SpaceX hopes to pluck from the planets especially caught his attention, since it’s central to the plot of a sci-fi streamer he loves. “In the SpaceX S-1, where they talk about things SpaceX will eventually do, one of them is asteroid mining. Literally, there is really a great, wonderful sci-fi show on Apple TV called ‘For All Mankind,’ and asteroid mining plays an important part on the show. (Indeed page 71 of the SpaceX S-1 contains the following: “We plan to pursue asteroid mining operations to extract metals and other critical resources from near-Earth and main-belt asteroids, providing abundant raw materials for space-based industries.”)

It also puzzles Eisman that Musk is building an enterprise that straddles at least two industries, and may well add another, when the corporate world’s moving in the opposite direction. “Why make the company into a massive conglomerate, when conglomerates are totally out of favor? The world is de-conglomerate-izing. People want pure play, and they’re in rockets, Starlink and AI.” The prospect that SpaceX will buy Tesla, Musk’s second largest holding, is especially appalling to Eisman. “Tesla’s been a horrible failure for the past several years,” he avows. “Every year Musk says we’ll have self-driving cars and robotaxis, which he doesn’t do, and all we know is that earnings go down year after year. Musk is a cult, so people keep saying ‘wait till next year.’”

Eisman holds a dim view of the hyper-scalers’ future in AI

Eisman points to a part of the S-1 that’s effectively a manifesto wagering SpaceX’s future on AI. In fact, its chief AI product sports a brand name that Eisman fondly recalls from his teenage sci-fi enchantment. “Robert Heinlein invented the word ‘grok’ in his novel ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ [1961] about a Martian who comes earth,” says Eisman. “In the book, ‘grok’ means ‘deep understanding.’” In contrast to its lofty moniker, Grok the product’s a lightweight, claims Eisman. “The S-1 says that SpaceX total addressable market is $28.5 trillion, and the irony is that over 90% of that TAM is AI, which is all about Grok,” he intones. “Grok is a third-tier product. I’ve heard reports that even the engineers in Musk’s own space division won’t use it because it sucks.”

Overall, he says, the outlook for the hyperscalers is darkening fast. “We’ve seen a sea change in their AI story, and not for the better,” he declares. “That’s because of two vectors. The first is that for the hyperscalers, AI is becoming increasingly capital intensive. Last year, Alphabet spent $80 billion on AI and funded it from cash flow. This year, it will spend $180 to $190 billion and raised $85 billion in stock. Now, they all have to raise funding through stock offerings because the table stakes get bigger and bigger.” He adds that post-IPO, SpaceX will need to keep tapping the capital markets since its recurring cash flow doesn’t come close to meeting its hunger for AI-driven capex.

“The other vector is that there are no ‘moats’ in AI,” he contends. “Someone moves to ChatGPT then to Gemini then to Claude. Even if AI is the greatest thing since the invention of the printing press, there are no moats to shield the providers. You don’t want to be the hyperscalers selling this highly competitive product where you have to cut prices to win customers. You want to be the suppliers selling them the picks and shovels, the chips and networking gear the hyper-scalers buy to make their products. Those products are highly customized and protected.” For Eisman, it’s far better to be a Nvidia, Arista or Cisco riding the capex boom than a Meta, Oracle, Microsoft or Alphabet battling a field of fellow behemoths in the brutal arena where the enterprise and retail solutions are easily swappable.

Eisman stresses that he’s not advising anyone to short SpaceX. “I have no opinion on what will happen to SpaceX,” he says. “From a fundamental perspective, it’s ridiculous But a lot of things can be ridiculous for a long time.” For this dourest of doubters, Musk’s claims for the feats ahead can only happen in the SpaceX founder’s head, or in the sci-fi fantasies Eisman grew up on.