Topic: How To Invest

What is Pat’s commentary for the week of July 21, 2020

Article Excerpt

The investment business is riddled with conflicts of interest. These conflicts have a way of tainting investment predictions so that they agree with and support sales pitches. Your best defense against this arrangement is to maintain a healthy sense of skepticism. You should feel free to examine and question the basis for a prediction. You need to keep in mind that many predictions make superficial sense. They go wrong by misinterpreting facts, or leaving them out of the discussion altogether. In particular, you should treat economic predictions with a larger-than average dose of skepticism. Economic forecasts attract far more media and investor attention than they deserve—way out of proportion to their value in guiding your investment decisions. That’s true at all times, but especially today. Accurate economic forecasts are rare. There are simply too many economic variables that can have an impact, and they can interact in too many different ways. Each of these factors, and every interaction that takes place amongst them,…