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]
Index funds are mutual funds that invest so as to match market-index performance.
Those devices designed to treat sleep apnea get far less media attention than other devices focused on a host of issues, from high blood pressure, obesity and diabetes to depression, stroke and heart problems. Still, increasingly, public and private health insurers recognize, publicize and pay for sleep apnea treatment. That’s because untreated, it can lead to several complications requiring much more costly treatment.
People who are only vaguely familiar with sleep apnea may think of it as a disease of the elderly, but it can strike anyone, children included. We think this discrepancy in awareness creates a great long-term opportunity for ResMed. In fact, the stock is up more than 86% since we added it to our Power Growth Investor newsletter in July 2019. Going forward, however, we still see the stock as an attractive special situation, with significant room to move higher.