What Income Investors Need To Know About Tobacco: Part 1

Personal Note: Today is a very busy day (well, the rest of the week really) with 3 meetings and 2 doctors’ appointments, so I’m breaking up the promised tobacco special report (it’s been a while since I looked at PM, MO, and BTI), and I promised an update after forgetting to include tobacco in yesterday’s article.  The 5 Highest Yielding Dividend Aristocrats For January (And Some Updates About GNG) I’m going to try to get out daily articles, and if something takes longer than expected, I’ll break it into a multi-part report.  As I tell the GNG team, “When it comes to a complete project, it takes as long as it takes.”  Bonus Report On Global Nicotine Market (Ex-China) At The Bottom Of This Report While I was working on my report, Gemini 3 Pro Deep Research was working on a retiree-focused report on the global nicotine market.  So we can get a fact-based snapshot of the industry today Why A Multi-Part Report On Tobacco?  There are a few reasons why I think it’s worth a multi-part report on tobacco.  First, a lot of our GNG members are retired or nearing retirement, and tobacco is a traditionally high-yielding, low-volatility, and defensive (recession-resistant) industry.  Second, it’s actually the best-performing industry in US stock market history.  Source: Ploutos In fact, Philip Morris (Altria) was the best performing stock in history (though eventually, some tech firm may surpass it).  Source: Perplexity Pro That’s not to say that Tobacco has been performing so well because it’s a growth industry (cigarette volumes have been declining for around 60 years in the US). It’s rather that the business is so stable, and long lived, and as long as the industry can adapt to seemingly insurmountable secular trends (like declining volumes), say by raising prices faster than volumes decline, cutting costs, and buybacks, then the high-yield of the industry results in strong compounding effects.  And that’s how you can get an almost 3 MILLION X return in 100 years, because if you compound anything for long enough, you get life-changing numbers.  And 3rd, adding tobacco to the Ultra ZEUS portfolio may potentially make it better, even for 2026.  Ultra ZEUS: The Ultimate "Magic Money Machine" (22% Target Return with Ultra Low Volatility) For My Family's Needs For 2026 As I explained in this report, this year I have 2 “babies” which are GNG, and the ZEUS fund, which funds it.  And as I mentioned in yesterday’s high-yield aristocrat report, setting up systems that took 6 years to develop in a fraction of the time, while running a full company and scaling up the team, is hard.  So when I did the Ultra Zeus optimization, I didn’t have time to do a thorough screening for the best companies (for each ZEUS Bucket).  The last big update was done before we lost access to DK tools.  That’s why I only used the ZEUS 2025 stocks (the 10 of them) in the optimizer, and that’s why the results seem so odd (just 2 growth stocks and 2 value stocks).  These daily reports will give me the time to check whether adding other blue-chip companies will help improve Ultra ZEUS 2026.  Source: Portfolio Visualizer Premium This year, we’re going to launch a superior version of Portfolio Visualizer’s portfolio optimizer, but until we can, you can see how it’s possible to set up a comparison optimizer.  Note that the limitation is that the time frame can only go as far back as the earliest (newest) IPO stock.  In this case, VFLO July 2023.  Connor has figured out a way to run backtests and Monte Carlos (using historical data) on a portfolio that includes both new and old stocks (up to 20 years), which is a huge benefit in terms of statistical significance.  But here’s an example of how adding the big three tobacco companies to Ultra ZEUS would change things.  EPD o