Topic: How To Invest

Pat: You recommend that most investors should hold up to 20% of their stock portfolios in Consumer stocks. Why 20%?

Article Excerpt

Spreading your stock investments across the five main economic sectors is one of the main keys to successful investing. By doing so, you avoid overloading yourself with stocks that are about to slump simply because of industry conditions or changes in investor fashion. By diversifying across the sectors, you also increase your chances of stumbling upon a market superstar — a stock that does two to three or more times better than the market average. These stocks come along every year. By nature, their appearance is unpredictable; if you could routinely spot them ahead of time, you’d quickly acquire a large proportion of all the money in the world, and nobody ever does that. Speaking very generally, stocks in the Resources & Commodities sector and the Manufacturing & Industry sectors expose you to above-average volatility, while those in the Finance and Utilities sectors involve below-average volatility. Shares of many finance-sector firms have been unusually volatile in the past few years, because…