Last week, Federal Reserve officials held their third meeting of the year, in which they decided to hold interest rates where they currently are, at 5.3%. Although the market had been hoping that this would be the meeting where we finally saw interest rates get cut, Jerome Powell stated that it was still too early to start cutting rates due to inflation still being stubbornly high. The central bankers reiterated during the meeting that they needed greater confidence that inflation was coming down before they started reducing interest rates.

As we await the Federal Reserve to start reducing interest rates, it’s resulted in several asset classes that are known for paying high dividends still offering aboveaverage yields. Two of which I'll discuss today offer, in my opinion, a reasonable riskreward tradeoff. I recently bought very small amounts of the following holdings, and I'm going to discuss why I did so, despite both of them still coming with risk. So keep that in mind before considering these holdings yourselves.