How To Invest

In addition, Pat thinks then beginner investors should cultivate two important qualities: a healthy sense of skepticism and patience.

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Investors should approach all investments with a healthy sense of skepticism. This can help keep you out of fraudulent stocks that masquerade as high-quality stocks. It will also keep you out of legally operated, but poorly managed, companies that promise more than they can possibly deliver.

If you are a new investor, you should also realize that losing patience can cause you to sell your best choices right before a big rise. All too often, investors buy a promising stock just as it enters a period of price stagnation. Even the best-performing stocks run into these unpredictable phases from time to time. They move mainly sideways in a wide range for months or years before their next big rise begins. (Stock brokers often refer to these stocks as “dead money.”)

If you lack patience, you run a big risk of selling your best choices in the midst of one of these phases, prior to the next big move upward. If you lose patience and sell, you are particularly likely to do so in the low end of the trading range, when stock prices have weakened and confidence in the stock has waned.

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How To Invest Library Archives
A: Valmont Industries Inc., $310.51, symbol VMI on New York (Shares outstanding: 21.3 million; Market cap: $6.6 billion; www.valmont.com), is a leader in designing and manufacturing highly engineered products and services for the global infrastructure development and agriculture industries.

Large-scale agriculture outfits use the company’s irrigation equipment and services to improve farm productivity while conserving freshwater resources....
A: VanEck Vectors Social Sentiment ETF, $14.14, symbol BUZZ on New York (Units outstanding: 4.1 million; Market cap: $58.0 million; www.vaneck.com), holds 75 stocks, each with a market cap of $5 billion or more; each of these stocks also generates social media attention.

The fund tracks the BUZZ NextGen AI U.S....
Most of our readers are familiar with our three-part Successful Investor investment strategy, which goes like this:
  1. Invest mainly in well-established, dividend-paying companies.
  2. Spread your money out across most if not all of the five main economic sectors (Manufacturing & Industry; Resources & Commodities; Consumer; Finance; and Utilities).
  3. Downplay or avoid stocks in the broker/media limelight.

Rule #3 would also apply to investment ideas that are getting a lot of media attention....
POST HOLDINGS INC., $91.72, symbol POST on New York, is a leading maker of cereals and packaged foods. The company has four operating segments: Post Consumer Brands (36% of sales), Foodservice (38%), Weetabix (8%), and Refrigerated Retail (18%). It also holds a 50% equity interest in the Alpen Food Company South Africa Limited, a maker of RTE (ready-to-eat) cereal and muesli.

In October 2019, Post sold shares of its BellRing Brands business to the public through an IPO....
CALIAN GROUP LTD., $60.00, is a buy. The stock (symbol CGY on Toronto) lets investors tap the Ottawa-based company’s four main operating segments:

Advanced Technologies offers products and engineering services for the space, communications, nuclear, agriculture, defence and government segments....
INTEL CORP., $25.14, Nasdaq symbol INTC, remains a buy for long-term gains.

The company is the world’s leading maker of computer chips: its products power 65% of all personal computers and 80% of all datacentres.

Under Intel’s new strategic plan, which it announced in 2021, the company aims to improve its technical expertise and expand its ability to make chips for other companies.

It recently started construction on a $20 billion chipmaking complex in Ohio and is spending $15.3 billion to expand its facility in Arizona....
WALMART INC., $142.47, New York symbol WMT, is a buy.

The company is the world’s biggest retailer, with 10,635 outlets in 24 countries.

The discount retailer continues to benefit as rising inflation is drawing more shoppers to its value-focused stores.

In the fiscal 2023 fourth quarter, ended January 31, 2023, sales rose 7.3%, to $164.05 billion from $152.87 billion a year earlier....
TECK RESOURCES LTD., $52.81, Toronto symbol TECK.B, remains a buy for investors seeking long-term gains from the Resources sector of their portfolio.

The company now plans to spin off its metallurgical coal (a key ingredient in steelmaking) operations as a separate, publicly-traded company called Elk Valley Resources Ltd....

You can see our Income-Growth Dividend Payer Portfolio for March 2023 here.


You can’t fake a record of dividends....

You can see our Income-Seeking Portfolio for March 2023 here.


Our WSSF Portfolio for Income-Seeking Investors gives recommendations on stocks with a history of dividends, plus dividend growth potential.


In addition to yield, earnings and p/e ratios, we show you how much each company has raised (or cut) its dividend in the past five years in the third column from the right in the table below.


Please note that among our Utility recommendations, we indicate with footnotes which of three main utility industries each company operates in: Telecommunications, Electric or Pipeline.


Each segment faces its own challenges....