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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Corteva offers investors exposure to key agricultural growth areas: corn and soybean seeds; and crop protection products. Those markets can be volatile due to weather, economic cycles, and so on. But Corteva mitigates those risks through its scale, product diversification, and rock-solid balance sheet.

Note that the stock, itself, is a spinoff. As you’ve heard us say before, spinoffs are about as close as you can get to a sure thing in investing.

It’s worth noting that Corteva is now planning a spinoff of its own—it wants to split its seed businesses from its crop protection products. We think this latest move will set up shareholders for even more gains since stock market investors tend to prefer “pure-play” firms that are easier to compare against rival firms.

You Can See Our WSSF Income-Seeking Portfolio for March 2026 Here.


We designed our TSINetwork Ratings to give you an idea of the investment quality and risk in stocks we recommend, so you can build a portfolio that suits your needs and objectives.

Other rating systems use a mechanical process to make investment decisions.
A: Axon Enterprises Inc., $440.42, symbol AXON on Nasdaq, (Shares outstanding: 79.4 million; Market cap: $35.0 billion; www.axon.com) is best known for its Taser line of non-lethal weapons for law enforcement and consumers. The law enforcement technology company also sells body cameras, in-car cameras, software and drones.

Axon’s customers include first responders at the international, federal, state, and local law enforcement levels, as well as fire departments, prisons, and the justice sector. It also has commercial clients.

Axon has two operating segments:

Software and Services (44% of revenue): The segment is growing rapidly and integrates Axon’s hardware devices with cloud-based digital evidence management and analytics tools.
A: Fidelity Global Value Long/Short ETF, $9.49, symbol FGLS on the CBOE Canada Exchange (Units outstanding: 5.0 million; Market cap: $47.5 million; www.fidelity.ca) invests globally by taking long positions in companies that the manager believes are undervalued; at the same time, it takes short positions in what it sees as overvalued companies.

(Unlike a long position in investing, under a short-position strategy, an investor sells a stock they do not own but have borrowed. The investor sells the stock at the current price with the expectation of buying it back later at a lower price and so realizing a profit because of the decline.)

This ETF launched on February 1, 2024, with a very high MER of 1.51%. Previously, it operated as a mutual fund, starting in October 2020.
A: Caterpillar Inc., $768.52, symbol CAT on New York (Shares outstanding: 468.0 million; Market cap: $359.7 billion; www.caterpillar.com), is leading maker of construction and mining equipment, diesel and natural gas engines, industrial gas turbines, and diesel-electric locomotives.

The company distributes its products in 197 countries through a network of 157 independent dealers. Caterpillar receives a little over half of its sales from North America, followed by EMEA (19%), Asia Pacific (18%), and Latin America (10%). Its clients are mainly in the mining, logging, farming, construction, power and energy industries. The company also provides dealers and customers with equipment financing and insurance.

Here are the company’s key segments:

Power and Energy: This is the largest segment, accounting for around 40% of annual sales. Products and services include engines, generator sets, integrated systems and solutions, turbines and turbine-related services.