Topic: How To Invest

What is Pat's commentary for the week of August 8, 2012?

Article Excerpt

You might say we specialize in “plain vanilla” stocks, bonds and mutual funds—the ordinary kind, in other words, without any special features. We almost always stay out of new issues. We’ve always been highly selective in our income trust and royalty trust recommendations. We advise against trading in options and futures. The only investment innovation we’ve added to our list is the exchange-traded fund or ETF. But ETFs are unlike other investment innovations; they aim to simplify your investing, rather than complicate it. Of course, we stay out of ETFs that use leverage, or that aim to pursue some sort of market theory, or that invest in a narrow market segment or theme. We’ve found that our exclusionary rules leave us plenty of scope for sound investing, with lots of high-value opportunities and few surprises. In investment innovations, surprises tend to be unpleasant. That’s because innovations aim at selling more “product” (as brokers say) to investors, rather than raising investor returns. In…