In addition, Pat thinks then beginner investors should cultivate two important qualities: a healthy sense of skepticism and patience.
Investors should approach all investments with a healthy sense of skepticism. This can help keep you out of fraudulent stocks that masquerade as high-quality stocks. It will also keep you out of legally operated, but poorly managed, companies that promise more than they can possibly deliver.
If you are a new investor, you should also realize that losing patience can cause you to sell your best choices right before a big rise. All too often, investors buy a promising stock just as it enters a period of price stagnation. Even the best-performing stocks run into these unpredictable phases from time to time. They move mainly sideways in a wide range for months or years before their next big rise begins. (Stock brokers often refer to these stocks as “dead money.”)
If you lack patience, you run a big risk of selling your best choices in the midst of one of these phases, prior to the next big move upward. If you lose patience and sell, you are particularly likely to do so in the low end of the trading range, when stock prices have weakened and confidence in the stock has waned.
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Pat McKeough responds to many requests for specific advice on what stocks to buy and other questions on investment strategy and the economy from the members of his Inner Circle. Every week, his comments and recommendations on the most intriguing questions of the past week go out to all Inner Circle members. And each week, we offer you one of the highlights from these Q&A sessions. While we reserve our buy-hold-sell advice for Inner Circle members, these excerpts provide a great deal of information and analysis on stocks we’ve covered for members of Pat’s Inner Circle. This week an Inner Circle member asked us about the popular online movie and TV service Netflix. A pioneer in sending DVD’s by mail and offering online entertainment at a low monthly fee, the company has seen its share price rocket by over 360% in less than a year. Pat examines the company’s aggressive thrust into producing original content as it seeks to maintain its dominant position in an increasingly competitive industry. ...
The company has since reopened two of these lines and expects to restart the third in the next few days. The shutdown is costing Enbridge about $1 million a day in lost revenue. To put that in context, the company’s revenue was $8.0 billion, or over $89 million a day, in the first three months of 2013.
Enbridge is a buy.
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For example, CP has cut the time it takes to ship intermodal containers between Toronto and Calgary by 20 hours. The trip now takes 64 hours.
Speeding up service will help CP attract more customers. It will also help it reach its goal of lowering its operating ratio from 75.8% in the first quarter of 2013 to around 65% by the middle of 2016. (Operating ratio is calculated by dividing a railway’s regular operating costs by its revenue. The lower the ratio, the better.)
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