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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In mid-March, I wrote about a question I often hear from investors: “Should I invest in stocks in retirement?” Here are two more points on that subject.
First, many investors disregard the similarity between pensions and bonds, insofar as both provide a fixed annual return.
For instance, consider a retired investor with pension income of $50,000 a year, and a $1 million stock portfolio that generates dividends of $30,000 a year....
On July 1, 2016, the old Hertz Global Holdings Inc....
As you know, one of the three key points to our Successful Investor strategy is that you need to downplay or avoid stocks in the broker/media limelight. A similar warning applies to investment-related ideas.
Just to refresh your memory: we advise you to downplay or avoid stocks in the limelight because the limelight distorts investment quality....
The company’s Seven and Seven Plus CGM systems have FDA approval and are used for outpatient monitoring....
The company sells its hardware and software to content creators, broadcasters, specialty channels and TV service providers....
The company gets most of its utility poles from the timberlands it leases in Quebec and B.C....
Customers typically purchase the hardware upfront, and then enter into a long-term contract for software updates and monitoring services....
If you take a university-level psychology or medical course, you run the risk of “medical student’s disease”. This happens when you read about disease symptoms, and get a sudden fear that they describe something you already suffer from.
A good teacher will tell you that many symptoms in your textbook are exaggerations of normal, everyday fluctuations in your health and vitality....