Topic: How To Invest

What is Pat's commentary for the week of February 21, 2012?

Article Excerpt

As part of our three-part Successful Investor portfolio management philosophy, we advise you to downplay or avoid stocks that are in the broker/media limelight. That’s because this limelight raises investor expectations. When limelight stocks fail to live up to these heightened expectations, and that often happens, downturns can be brutal. Similar advice applies to types of investments, such as exchange traded funds (ETFs). These investment innovations are in the broker/media limelight right now for all the usual reasons. From the media point of view, ETFs come with a good story: you can save money because they come with much lower fees than conventional mutual funds, plus there’s news to report, since new ETFs are coming out all the time. From the broker point of view, the media attention makes ETFs easier to sell to clients. In addition, new issues of ETFs are coming out all the time, and brokers make several times more profit selling new issues than existing issues. ETFs come in a..