Topic: How To Invest

Q: Pat, can you clarify something for me? When you respond to a question with a comment such as “okay to hold” in your portfolio, are you really saying it’s a “sell”?

Article Excerpt

A: We continually sift through the Canadian and U.S. markets for stocks to recommend to our clients. Even so, we generally get excited about only a handful—that is, excited enough to recommend them in our publications. A much larger number of stocks we look at have, in our view, one or more serious flaws. We can’t cover them all in the newsletters, of course. But if you ask about them here, we’ll tell you to sell. However, a large number of stocks also fall within a gray area. Though we wouldn’t advise buying them, they are “okay to hold” in our view. In other words, if you want to hold these stocks, we can’t voice any strong objection, but it’s not something we recommend. If you say, “Forget ‘okay to hold’—tell me if it’s a ‘buy’ or a ‘sell,” we are always going to translate “okay to hold” as “sell.” On the other hand, when we apply the one-word recommendation “hold” to stocks we…