David Cohen

In an era of near zero interest rates, few investors have sufficient retirement savings to live off the income produced by a portfolio of low-risk bank deposits and Treasurys. Investors can strive to address this shortfall by reaching down the scale of fixed-income credit quality (to aptly named “junk” bonds) or through exposure to high volatility, high-yielding alternative asset classes.

Returns of capital are considered an inferior way to pay out corporate dividends because they do not come out of company profits and instead represent the return of an investor's original investment capital back to the investor.