stock investing

To succeed as an investor, you need to overcome the temptation to think that you can succeed as a fair-weather investor—one who is in the market when prices are going up, and out of the market during the inevitable downturns.

If you try to do that, you will wind up selling when much of the damage is done, and buying your way back in when much of the recovery has already taken place. Worse, you may wind up buying back in at higher prices than you got when you sold.

Market timing can be especially damaging to long-term portfolio returns when you miss out on the very best-performing days for the markets. And that’s easy to do when investors are constantly bombarded with news about events that may portend (but not always deliver!) big, long-lasting market declines.

A key aspect of the TSI investment philosophy is the diversification of portfolio holdings across the five main economic sectors. That way, investors can avoid overloading their portfolios with stocks that are about to slump simply because of sector conditions or changes in investor fashion. At the same time, they keep exposure to stocks that may be ready to start a period of out-performance.

The essential point about profiting from the five sectors approach is that investors should spread their investments across most, if not all, of them. Investors who do that and follow the other two parts of the TSI investment philosophy—sticking mainly with well-established, mostly dividend-paying companies and focusing on stocks that are out of the broker/media limelight—gain a double benefit.

Investing in the best growing stocks will put you in a position to make significant gains, but it comes with risk as well. Follow our tips to make smarter—and safer—picks

Understanding the difference between aggressive and conservative stocks will help you invest more safely with a well-diversified portfolio

Learn how to invest in DRIP stocks more effectively by considering these qualities of the top dividend-paying shares—and how they fit into your long-term portfolio

Many investors like to use analogies from sports or the military to describe their investment approach, so they’ll often use the phrase playing the stock market.

Discover how to read stocks for long-term investing success through these tools. Investors who learn how to read stocks can do this by tapping into long-term growth that inevitably comes to well-established companies when they operate in relatively free economies during relatively prosperous years and decades.

Many investors like to describe different approaches to investment decision making by sticking a one-word label on them. This can make conversations flow more smoothly, but it does little to raise anybody’s investment knowledge. In fact, it can lead to false impressions.

There are big differences in penny stock vs. regular stock investing—mostly centered around risk. Many “regular stocks” are blue-chip stocks.

Understanding stock options will lead you to see them as highly speculative investments—and more like a gamble than a sure thing