How To Invest

Pat McKeough has been making investing for beginners simple—and profitable—by helping investors make big gains for more than 25 years. His advice to beginning investors is the same as it is for all investors: buy high-quality, mostly dividend paying stocks (or ETFs that hold these stocks) and evenly spread your investments over the five main economic sectors (Resources, Manufacturing, Finance, Utilities and Consumer). Pat also believes investors should avoid stocks in the broker/media limelight and focus on those with hidden or little-noticed assets.

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

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 Post Archives

Dividend vs. Index Investing, or Both?

Dividend vs. Index Investing, or Both?

What are the key differences between dividend and index investing?
Dividend investing focuses on stocks that pay regular cash distributions to shareholders, while index investing aims to replicate the performance of a broad market index by holding a diversified portfolio of securities.

One big advantage of index… Read More

What to hold in your RRSP

What to hold in your RRSP

Discover types of stocks and other investments to keep outside your RRSP—and the types of investments that benefit from an RRSP tax shelter.
Registered retirement savings plans, or RRSPs, are the best-known and most widely used tax shelter in Canada. The tax treatment of RRSPs is… Read More

The Hidden Drawbacks of Split-Share Corporations

The Hidden Drawbacks of Split-Share Corporations

Split-share corporations come with inherent drawbacks that can hand investors unexpected and unwelcomed costs sooner than they’d planned
Split-share corporations: they’re just one of the areas in which Pat McKeough’s Inner Circle can get our investment research. Members also get to ask investment questions of Pat… Read More

What is Market Timing Theory?

What is Market Timing Theory?

Market timing theory attempts to interpret and detect buy and sell signals in trading patterns and history
The practice of market timing consists of coming up with and acting on a series of guesses (or estimates, or probability assessments) to use in your buying and selling… Read More