Topic: How To Invest

What is Pat’s commentary for the week of December 24, 2013?

Article Excerpt

The stock-market risk factors that you read about repeatedly, over long periods, rarely help you make money in the stock market. In fact, the more you hear about warnings of a coming negative factor, the less likely it is that things will work out the way the warnings predict. That’s only natural. Word about possible or upcoming negatives gets around. People brace themselves to survive the negatives. They do whatever they can to blunt the impact of these developments before they occur. Something like this seems to have happened with the U.S. Federal Reserve’s “QE” or Quantitative Easing program. Under this program, the Fed has been buying $85 billion a month worth of U.S. government bonds, in an attempt to expand the U.S. money supply and hold down interest rates. Pessimists repeatedly warned that the Fed had to cut back on this buying eventually. When it did, they predicted dire effects—higher interest rates and a sharp downturn in the stock market. Last…