As a Kiplinger's Personal Finance - Subscription holder, I often find good snippets of information. If you weed through the advice to buy mutual funds then it can be very helpful. Recently there was an article about the actively managed mutual funds versus index funds and a discussion on who wins. Once again, index funds came out on top.[ad#tdg-embedded] In the following image, the results are pretty clear. Over all periods of time, a relatively small percentage of actively managed funds …
Dividend Safety and Warnings
As dividend investors, we need to be constantly on the lookout for ways to reduce the risk in our portfolios. Even with relatively stable and fundamentally sound dividend stocks, there is work to do to determine how safe a that dividend growth company might be. In other words, we need to watch for certain warning signs that can tip us off to nasty things to come.[ad#tdg-embedded] There are a couple of things that investors can look for when trying to judge the safety of the dividend stocks …
DRIPs Are a Means to An End, Not A Reason to Buy a Stock
As a dividend investor, it is usually assumed that I love dividend reinvestment plans (DRIPs). Truth is that I think they are a great thing to use to save investment costs. However, I have met a lot of investors who believe that the use of a DRIP is an investment strategy in itself as opposed to the means to an end that it is. Let me explain.[ad#tdg-embedded] What is a DRIP A DRIP is a plan offered by a company whereby a shareholder registers his/her share ownership directly with that …
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Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor
The following is a guest post by Saj Karsan of Barel Karsan, a site dedicated to finding and discussing current value investments.[ad#tdg-embedded] Warren Buffett calls Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor "by far the best book on investing ever written". (A chapter-by-chapter summary of this book is available here.) Buffett studied under Graham while enrolled at Columbia Business School in 1950. The most important idea that Graham put forth in his teachings was the concept of a …
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Why ETF Marketing is Hurting Investors
The one thing that did the most to turn me off of mutual funds was their relentless marketing on how diversified they were. Invest in this mutual fund and you are diversified and safe - is what we often heard. All the while, mutual fund companies were charging enormous fees in the form of high MERs to do this. Sure many mutual funds provided good diversification but there was also this amazing alternative which involved simply buying the entire stock market through an index fund or index …
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