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What if you could double your returns on a 5% increase in stock price with no extra work? Sounds good right? That is the sales pitch you often hear from some stock brokers when they try to convince the average investor to buy stocks using margin - or borrowed money to purchase investments. When things go well, margin has the wonderful impact of multiplying your gains sometimes to the tune of doubling your returns. However, what brokerage houses don't tell you is that when things go bad they …

Continue Reading about Margin Can Make you Rich…or Really Really Poor

Time is your friend; impulse is you enemy. This quote from John Bogle really sums up the necessary thinking during the first quarter of the year and the start of quarter two. After the market drop we saw to start the year out and then in the last couple of weeks the market trying to rally and adding significant value it confirms the importance of not acting on impulse. The market is going to go down, and then it will go up, and then it will go down, and then it will go up....you get the …

Continue Reading about The Dividend Guy’s April Dividend Portfolio Review

If you are building a portfolio of individual securities, then the sectors you invest in should be part of your overall asset allocation plan. Recently I ran a post which energy companies are most predominant in a few dividend ETFs. I took this analysis one step further and tried to dissect what sectors dividend ETFs had represented. I do this to assist my own portfolio building process and asset allocation decisions - I want to make sure I have managed the risk appropriately in my portfolio …

Continue Reading about Which Sectors Do Dividend ETFs Invest In?

I believe that charts can help long-term investors. In particular, I believe they can give us a general sense of what the market is doing to help understand how our own stocks might be performing. In essence, if the market is going down then there is a good chance that your long-term dividend stock is heading down with it. If the broad market is going up your stock should be heading up with it. Let's deal with each of these scenarios separately. Market is Heading Up but your Stock is …

Continue Reading about Do Stock Charts Have a Place for Long-Term Investors?