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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The company designs, engineers, and builds equipment that produces industrial gases. That’s on top of its core business of furnishing atmospheric and process gases.
While market downturns are generally unsettling, even new investors are inclined to view them as a natural part of the market cycle—as an opportunity to purchase quality stocks at more attractive prices.
The uncertainty of a highly volatile market—the kind the Iran war has intensified—is usually a different matter. Days, weeks or even months of price swings can be particularly challenging for many investors and leave them unsure which way to move. For some, the urge is to get off the rollercoaster ride and move all or partly into cash.
That most-recent shift has contributed to the stock’s decline since the start of this year. The drop reflects investor fears about a possible “AI bubble” like the “dot-com bubble,” which peaked in 2000. Many investors worry today’s very high spending on AI infrastructure (chips, datacentres and so on) could lead to big stock price declines for companies if sales and profits fail to materialize.