Topic: How To Invest

What is Pat’s commentary for the week of April 11, 2023

Article Excerpt

Many people start out investing with unrealistic ideas of how much money they can make from short-term stock trading, and how quickly they’ll get rich. Inexperienced investors are shocked when they learn that successful investors rarely if ever do any short-term stock trading. (That applies to everybody from “The Wealthy Barber” to Warren Buffett.) After all, many stockbrokers, investor newsletters, cable TV financial kibitzers and so on seem to talk about nothing but day-to-day or hour-to-hour market trends. They make it sound easy to GRQ (Get Rich Quick). It’s easy to sort through yesterday’s investment news and pick out a reason that seems to explain why a stock or the entire market went up or down today. Trying to spot tomorrow’s winners today is vastly harder. Nobody does it consistently. The problem is that random factors have too much influence, and a big unpredictable impact on short-term market trends. They are like coin tosses or the spin of a roulette wheel. Each individual…