Wealth Management

If you’re new to investing, a good place to start managing your wealth is to consult your tax preparer or accountant. They may be able to provide you with financial planning services. They may also be able to refer you to somebody who can.

There are three types of professional wealth management services you can use.

  1. A full service stock broker - A good stock broker is one who understands investing and who has the integrity to settle conflicts of interest in the client’s favour. Good stock brokers can provide an effective and economical way to manage your investments. But if you are going to use a full-service broker, take the time to find a broker you can trust.
  2. A discount stock broker - A discount stock broker will simply carry out buy and sell orders for their clients, and charge lower commission rates than full-service brokers. You pay even lower commissions if you trade stocks online, instead of placing orders over the phone.
  3. Portfolio managers - A portfolio manager is someone who fully manages your wealth portfolio and has a fiduciary responsibility to make sound investment decisions on your behalf. Portfolio managers are more stringently regulated than full-service or discount brokers.

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The Money Game, a 1968 mega bestseller about investing, was an eye-opener for a generation of investors, myself included. The author, George Goodman, wrote under the pseudonym Adam Smith. It takes a lot of chutzpah for a writer to name himself after the 18th century Scottish father of modern economics, but Goodman/Smith pulls it off. In his book, Smith introduced a number of key investing concepts that go to the heart of our Successful Investor stock investment advice. Smith has a genius for encapsulating his ideas in anecdotes, and here’s one that jumps out. It concerns the need to invest opportunistically, rather than emotionally. The story concerns a group of portfolio managers on a tour of troubled factories in the U.S. northeast. When passing by one facility, the tour’s broker-organizer commented, “I understand this company has thousands of drug addicts among its employees in that facility alone.”...
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A good stock broker can help you manage your investments if you don’t want to do it yourself. However, good brokers have always been hard to find. And, as any good stock broker or experienced investor can tell you, bad brokers are all too common. By “bad brokers,” we mean those who put their own interests above their clients’. Keep in mind, however, that a bad stock broker can do this in a perfectly legal fashion by catering to their clients’ whims and weaknesses. Here are 3 ways to tell if brokers are putting their interests ahead of yours:...
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These 2 retirement planning tips can help you leave a well-organized and profitable estate
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As investors near retirement, their advisors often recommend that they move a larger part of their investments from stocks to bonds and other fixed-return investments. To some extent, this is an understandable strategy, since bonds provide steady income and a guarantee to repay the principal at maturity.

Stocks are bound to be more profitable for retirement investing than bonds

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