Topic: How To Invest

What is Pat’s commentary for the week of August 13, 2013?

Article Excerpt

Overall, investors lose more money to conflicts of interest than to any other single risk. That’s not a comment about the average broker’s sense of ethics. It’s simply a matter of frequency of exposure times risk per exposure. For example, suppose you tell your broker that you have some money and you want to invest it aggressively. He could suggest buying, say, some stock in Google. It’s a relatively young company in a fast-changing field, and it’s non-dividend-paying, so it’s somewhat aggressive as an investment. It has substantial profit potential, however, since it is the leader by far in a field with a lot of growth ahead. But if the broker advises you to buy Google, you’d only have to buy it once, and you might pay a commission of, say, 2% to 3% of the stock’s price. The broker is far better off financially if he advises you to try your luck in stock options. (These are investment products…