Topic: How To Invest

What is Pat’s commentary for the week of August 7, 2013?

Article Excerpt

Our Successful Investor approach has three key rules: 1. Invest mainly in well-established stocks with a history of sales and earnings, if not dividends; 2. Spread your money out across most if not all of the five main economic sectors—Manufacturing & Industry, Resources & Commodities, Consumer, Finance and Utilities; 3. Downplay or avoid stocks in the broker/media limelight. This third rule is less familiar than the first two, but every bit as crucial. That’s because it helps to protect you from the potentially costly side effects of human nature. Many good stocks are well-known, well-managed and widely followed—“household names”, as some investors refer to them. That’s a good description of most of the stocks we analyze and recommend. However, the broker/media limelight is far more exclusive. This limelight is where you’ll find stocks that are doing a lot of underwriting business with the brokerage industry, for acquisitions, stock and bond issues, and so on. Underwriting generates a lot of fees, and a..