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
A: Illinois Tool Works, $132.35, symbol ITW on NYSE (Shares outstanding: 331.8 million; Market cap: $43.4 billion; www.itw.com), is a multi-industry manufacturing company operating in 56 countries. Known as ITW, it has roughly 50,000 employees.

The company’s diversified range of industrial products includes aerospace technology, bridges, wind turbines, restaurant appliances, packaging solutions, electronics, deep-sea welding products, and a range of automotive components such as fasteners, door handles, powertrain, and refuelling systems.

ITW operates in seven industry segments: automotive products (22.9% of revenue), food equipment (14.8%), laboratory testing equipment (14.5%), welding equipment (10.7%), polymers & fluids (12.0%), construction products (11.7%), and consumer packaging & other specialty products (13.6%).

In 2012, the company undertook a strategic re-positioning in which it aggressively exited businesses and product lines that were operating in what it saw as commoditized markets....
A: Vanguard Consumer Discretionary ETF, $159.56, symbol VCR on New York, aims to track the MSCI US IMI Consumer Discretionary 25/50 Index. That index follows U.S. consumer discretionary companies. Those firms, in the manufacturing and service industries, are highly sensitive to economic cycles....
Recently some Inner Circle members have asked why the price/earnings ratios, or P/Es, of automakers, such as Ford Motor Co., are as low as they are today. They wonder if these low P/Es represent a warning sign, or a buying opportunity. There’s no simple answer to that question....
A: BMO Canadian High Dividend Covered Call ETF, $18.36, symbol ZWC on Toronto (Units outstanding: 21.1 million; Market cap: $387.4 million; www.bmo.com/gam/ca/investor/products/etfs), focuses on mostly high-quality Canadian stocks....
A: Patriot One Technologies, $1.80, symbol PAT on the Toronto Venture Exchange (Shares outstanding: 117.0 million; Market cap: $224.8 million; www.patriot1tech.com), develops radar devices and software.

The company hopes to offer a system it calls PATSCAN CMR....
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In general, pipelines have dropped lately along with the market. But their stock prices have also been hurt by investor concerns over rising interest rates. As rates rise, utilities are perceived to suffer because they have a lot of debt, and higher rates make it more expensive for them to raise money and refinance their existing debt....
For decades, we’ve advised Canadian investors to spread their holdings out geographically between Canadian and U.S. stocks. Our view is that investing one-fifth to one-third of your portfolio in U.S. stocks, and the remainder in Canadian stocks, provides all the international diversification you need.

When you invest outside Canada and the U.S., you may expose yourself to extra costs and hidden risks....