How To Invest

In addition, Pat thinks then beginner investors should cultivate two important qualities: a healthy sense of skepticism and patience.

[text_ad]

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.

[text_ad]

Read More Close
How To Invest Library Archives
A: Dream Global REIT, $11.05, symbol DRG.UN on Toronto (Units outstanding: 175.1 million; Market cap: $1.9 billion; www.dream.ca/global), is a Canadian real estate investment trust that focuses on investing outside the country....
Dear Inner Circle member,

When you try to figure out the various trends and developments that can have an impact on your investments, resist the urge to focus on any single issue or area. Instead, try to see how it all fits together.

The important issues and factors always include positives and negatives....
A: Baytex Energy, $3.72, symbol BTE on Toronto (Shares outstanding: 235.5 million; Market cap: $873.5 million; www.baytexenergy.com), explores for, develops and produces oil and gas in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Texas....
A: B2Gold Corp., $3.55, symbol BTO on Toronto (Shares outstanding: 939.4 million; Market cap: $3.4 billion; www.b2gold.com), owns four mines: the Limon and Libertad gold mines in Nicaragua; the Otjikoto mine in Namibia and the Masbate mine in the Philippines....
A: Sanofi (ADR), $49.70, symbol SNY on New York (ADRs outstanding: 2.5 billion; Market cap: $126.1 billion; en.sanofi.com) is a global pharmaceutical company based in France. It has more than 100,000 employees and 87 manufacturing plants around the world, with products sold in more than 170 countries.

Sanofi operates five global business units: Diabetes & Cardiovascular, Specialty Care (MS, Oncology, etc.), Vaccines, General Medicines & Emerging Markets, and Consumer Healthcare.

The company’s shares have moved up this year, thanks to strong demand for its multiple sclerosis drugs and vaccines in emerging markets....
Some advisors like to use sports or military analogies to describe their investment approach. It seems to me that this serves to withhold the details and gloss over the risks. But if I had to compare our investing approach to anything outside the investment business, I’d choose chess.

Good chess players never “go for broke,” as the saying goes....
A: Vanguard Consumer Discretionary ETF, $142.61, symbol VCR on New York, aims to track the MSCI US Investable Market Consumer Discretionary 25/50 Index. It’s an index that invests in U.S. consumer discretionary companies. These firms are in manufacturing and service industries that tend to be the most sensitive to economic cycles....
A: Parkland Fuel Corp., $26.14, symbol PKI on Toronto (Shares outstanding: 130.5 million; Market cap: $3.4 billion, www.parkland.ca), operates gas stations, convenience stores and a fuel-distribution business for motorists, businesses, households and wholesale customers in Canada and the U.S.

The company’s shares have moved down from a new high of over $32 in May to today’s price.

Parkland’s shares had moved up from around $23 last August to that new high mostly after Alimentation Couche-Tard, as part of its deal to buy CST, agreed to sell a significant portion of CST’s Canadian assets to Parkland for $986.0 million....
A: MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates, $71.31, symbol MDA on Toronto (Shares outstanding: 36.3 million; Market cap: $2.6 billion; www.mdacorporation.com), offers satellite space to a range of service providers, including television and radio broadcasters, and broadband Internet and mobile communications companies.

The company is also a leading supplier of communication satellites and satellite-antenna subsystems, including related ground infrastructure and support services....
Dear Inner Circle member,

I must say I cringed a little when I read the text of President Trump’s first speech at the UN last week. It happened when he came right out and said he would destroy North Korea, if the U.S. has to defend itself or its allies against the current regime in that country.

Of course, a simple statement of any of life’s hard truths can make just about anybody cringe.

You’ll cringe if you learn you’re about to get fired, or that you or someone you love has a deadly disease, or that your house is in the path of a hurricane....