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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For example, we don’t recommend any investment plan or product that needs to succeed in stock options dealings to make a good return for its investors....
Rather than aiming to set up a TFSA as a separate portfolio, we think that the best approach for investors is to treat all their holdings—regardless of what account they are in—as if they were all in a single account....
The $58.3 million fund started up in May 2010....
The concept fascinates a lot of people, especially investors....
Here’s how they work:
When a real-return bond is issued, the level of the consumer price index (CPI) on that date is applied to the bond. After that, both the principal and interest payments are adjusted every six months, upwards or downwards from that base level, to compensate for a rise or fall in the CPI.
Government of Canada real-return bonds pay interest semi-annually, on June 1 and December 1.
Here’s an example:
The Bank of Canada issues $400 million of 30-year bonds maturing on December 1, 2048....
The country also has flexible labour markets, high productivity and an emphasis on high-value exports that are not particularly sensitive to price competition....
The underlying credit quality of preferred share issuers can be a negative factor in some cases; for example, when the issuer’s share price is falling.
So unlike GICs, which don’t fall in value, the prices of preferreds can decline along with stock markets.
If you want to own a preferred share as part of the fixed-income segment of your portfolio, and you can accept some risk, then preferreds are okay to hold....