Topic: How To Invest

What is Pat’s commentary for the week of March 5, 2013?

Article Excerpt

If you lost interest in the market last year and haven’t paid much attention to it since, you might think of today as a “pinch-me” moment—in other words, “Am I dreaming?” A lot of investors are in that position. In the past year or two, many have come to take it for granted that stock prices face years of stagnation or decline. This was quite different from our view—almost the opposite. The stock market hit bottom in 2009. Since then, we have felt the long-term outlook was for rising prices. In the meantime, stocks were providing dividend yields that beat bank or bond interest. Stocks presented an attractive buying opportunity, even if they often moved erratically in the past few years. When the market began creeping up, toward the end of 2012—when the world was supposedly on the edge of the so-called “fiscal cliff”—negative commentators dismissed stock buyers as “lemmings” and “small-time, uninformed investors” who always “come into the market at the…