This stock's yield will only be this high temporarily, so if you worry about having a dependable income stream to help you during your retirement, jump on this chance to earn a 17% and growing yield forever. 

As the stock markets fall, my email box and news feeds are starting to fill up with dire rumors as to why a particular company is in trouble. These warnings generate the fears that dividends will soon be cut, eliminated, or worse. These rumors can generate extra selling pressure on share values that have already fallen significantly.

I find it somewhat amazing that a chat room thread or an uninformed article on a third-tier financial website can have so much power, at least in the short-term, over share prices. As hopefully better-informed income focused investors, these rumor mill share price hits are a good time to buy or add shares and earn tremendously high yields.

In a recent interview, Jay Hatfield, portfolio manager for the InfraCap MLP ETF (NYSE: AMZA) said, “Predicting irrational behavior is a fundamentally flawed exercise.” He also noted that if the market can price a stock to yield 18%, why not 36%? At some point, markets need to return to some level of rational pricing. In the meantime, these price disruptions allow investors to lock in what look like irrational yields, and if these yields are on stable dividend paying companies, you have locked in those yields for the long-term.

This week three stocks that I follow have been hit by either unfounded rumors or just plain old misleading internet information, resulting in big share price declines and the opportunity to pick up tremendous yields and upside potential. Before I discuss these three, I want to note that the AMZA ETF is currently priced to yield over 30%, which is another way you might want to lock in an extra high yield.

With a share price decline from around $16.50 to a current $10.50, Ship Finance International (NYSE: SFL) is now priced to yield 17%. This week's drop from above $13 was fueled by a rumor that one of SFL's bulk carrier leasing customers was on the verge of bankruptcy. The eight ships were just purchased last Fall in a sale/leaseback deal. It seems unlikely that Ship Finance would not have done the deal unless they could verify the stability of the new customer. It seems that this rumor was some chat room claim, probably started by someone who wanted to short the stock.