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
Investors often ask, “When do I sell?” There is no simple, fits-on-a-t-shirt answer. But there are several things that should not, in and of themselves, prompt you to sell.



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The record date is the date on which a person has to actually own shares in the company in order to receive the declared dividend.

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Here’s the text of the most-recent letter I sent to our Portfolio Management clients in January.

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The Canadian Securities Exchange (CSE), formerly the Canadian National Stock Exchange (CNSX), is one of the country’s alternative stock exchanges....
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