Topic: How To Invest

What is Pat’s commentary for the week of August 9, 2016

Article Excerpt

To succeed as an investor, you have to develop a sense of the investment spectrum. This is a mental conception, or construct, that helps you understand the tradeoffs you face as an investor. The investment spectrum differs from what you find in the physical world, where the two ends of most spectrums are opposites of each other. Those opposites—hot vs. cold, high-frequency vs. low, and so on—are generally easy to spot and measure. In contrast, the two ends of the investment spectrum represent extremes that are different but not opposites. These extremes often seem easy to measure. But that is an illusion because the length of the measuring tape keeps changing. It depends on what’s happening in a particular investment, or elsewhere in the investment world. For instance, consider the p/e ratio (the ratio of a stock’s price to its per-share earnings). Many investors start out with the idea that a low p/e ratio is a big plus, because it puts…