Topic: How To Invest

What is Pat’s commentary for the week of October 25, 2016

Article Excerpt

Dear Inner Circle member, Snap judgments can be a great time-saver, but they’re a poor tool for investment decision-making. They often produce extreme, random results—good or bad. If you happen to make money with a series of snap judgments, it can turn into a habit. This may lead you to invest ever-larger sums of money this way, and that’s when your risk really rises. After all, your random results will turn eventually from good to bad. That’s liable to happen just when random bad results can do the most damage to your finances. The problem with snap judgments is that they deprive you of perspective. It’s best to base buy and sell decisions on a broad sample of the vast information that’s available on any investment. With snap judgments, you zero in on a tiny and unrepresentative sample such as an individual news item. This news item may be an earnings report that beats the consensus forecast (the average earnings estimate from brokerage analysts)…