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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Special Market Report: Coronavirus
Today’s Inner Circle Q&A features a special report from Pat on the current state of the stock market in light of the coronavirus, and its impact on your investments.
Please read on for Pat’s thoughtful and practical views on what investors should consider in times like this.
In a sudden and deep stock-market drop like the one of the past few weeks, it’s all too easy to respond impulsively or go to extremes....
As always, we also feature safety-conscious gainers ready to add to your long-term returns. Algonquin Power keeps making acquisitions, but it cuts risk for investors by sticking with businesses it knows and backing that up with long-term guaranteed contracts.
Loblaw Cos. continues to prosper in the hyper-competitive Canadian supermarket business....
This fund holds a lot of former oil and gas trusts, pipeline or other utility trusts (most if not all now converted to conventional corporations), real estate investment trusts and stocks....
The iShares Global Healthcare ETF, $66.31, symbol IXJ on New York (Units outstanding: 31.8 million; Market cap: $2.1 billion; www.ishares.com/us), invests globally in healthcare companies.
The fund tracks the S&P Global Healthcare Index....
Many casual investors, financial journalists and brokers take it for granted that owning some bonds is a good thing....