Topic: How To Invest

What is Pat’s commentary for the week of October 3, 2017

Article Excerpt

Some advisors like to use sports or military analogies to describe their investment approach. It seems to me that this serves to withhold the details and gloss over the risks. But if I had to compare our investing approach to anything outside the investment business, I’d choose chess. Good chess players never “go for broke,” as the saying goes. Instead, they try to position their pieces so they can profit from the mistakes they expect from opponents who are less talented, less experienced or less patient. Successful investors follow a comparable approach. But the crucial difference is that they have no opponent who can be relied upon to make mistakes. Instead, successful investors try to arrange their portfolios so that they more-or-less automatically tap into the profit and long-term growth that inevitably comes to well-established companies operating in relatively free economies in relatively prosperous times. It’s essential to diversify, as you do if you follow our three-pronged investment approach. But in addition, successful…