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
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A: Morneau Shepell Inc., $33.06, symbol MSI on Toronto (Shares outstanding: 64.6 million; Market cap: $2.1 billion; www.morneaushepell.com), is the largest Canadian firm providing human resource consulting and outsourcing services....
A: Vermillion Energy Inc., $19.27 symbol VET on Toronto (Shares outstanding: 155.0 million; Market cap: $2.9 billion; www.vermilionenergy.com), is a Canadian-based oil and gas company with operations in this country, the U.S., France, Australia, Ireland, Germany and the Netherlands.

In the quarter ended June 30, 2019, its output jumped 27.8%, to 103,003 barrels of oil equivalent per day (45% natural gas and 55% oil) from 80,625 a year earlier.

Of that production, 59% was in Canada, 10% in France, 9% in the Netherlands, 8% in Ireland, 6% in Australia, 4% in Germany and 4% in the U.S....
A: The Horizons Seasonal Rotation ETF, $22.15, symbol HAC on Toronto (Units outstanding: 13.1 million; Market cap: $290.2 million; www.horizonsetfs.com), is an example of an ETF that shows a wide disparity between its holding and the investments that the sales literature describes.

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I’ve often written that conflicts of interest are the greatest risk you face as an investor. This idea seems to make sense to most Inner Circle members, even if they never thought of it that way before. But when I mention it to experienced investment professionals, most react in one of three ways:
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  2. An aggrieved or defensive look, as if I’ve raised a sensitive issue and they expect me to follow up with criticism of something they’ve done;
  3. A big smile, as if they know of an outrageous conflict of interest and are eager to share.

Recently I got response #3—a big smile—from a fellow portfolio manager....
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A: BMO International Dividend ETF, $19.68, symbol ZDI on Toronto (Units outstanding: 15.0 million; Market cap: $295.2 million; www.bmo.com), aims to provide exposure to a yield-weighted portfolio of dividend-paying companies in developed markets outside of North America....
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The company charges its customers an annual membership fee to shop at its locations....