When you buy shares, do not buy just one stock. Buy four or five at least. The most sophisticated professional can often do no better than pick seven winners out of ten selected. Suppose he had bought only the wrong three that he thought were right at the time he bought them!
When you invest in currencies on the Forex be just as cautious.
This is good way to limit our losses and help us stand a better chance of making a good return on our money in the long run.
The exception to the rule concerns cyclical stocks. These are stocks of companies whose well being depends on the ups and downs of business. Cyclicals are well known and are generally the heavy industries, both producers' goods like machine tools and consumers' goods like automobiles.
They feel the effects of recession and depression more than any other industries. In a recession they fall the most and in a comeback they rise the most. In order to play cyclicals you must watch the trend of business like a hawk the New York Times Index, the Federal Reserve Index and other measures and read the business section of the Times, the Wall Street Journal and Business Week, among other periodicals. You cannot hope to get the turning points either at the bottom or at the top, but you can recognize the early stages of a trend when you see them. It takes little examination of stock price charts to see that cyclicals move with general business conditions, and if we go back to the recessions of 1957 and 1960 we can see this. These are sample cyclical stocks.
Bethlehem Steel
U. S. Steel
General Motors
Black and Decker
Clark Equipment
Bucyrus Erie
Aluminum Company
Kennecott Copper
Now look at the price charts on the noncyclicals, and we can take just a few examples of these:
New York State Electric and Gas
Potomac Electric Power Company
Standard Oil of New Jersey
Obviously if things in the business world are getting poor, it is best to be in a noncyclical; and if things are starting to improve, it is best to get out of these and into a cyclical which fell during the recession. In the recession of 1960 I bought no stocks whatever. In July, 1958 I bought like mad and in the spring of 19611 spent about half of my time picking out buys in the market. I did not see the trend late in the fall of 1960. I was too conservative; but when I did invest I was very sure that the recession was over and that consequently my chances of success were good.
The quicker you get used to the sources of information on stocks, the better. If you are not willing to use these constantly, then do not buy stocks. The stock market is a most popular investment. Everyone is in it and everyone thinks he is an expert on it, that he knows the last word. To get in and try to make a decent return requires constant work and constant attention.
We should also be careful not to place too large a proportion of our money in currencies when we invest in the Forex. We may be certain that we know which way a currency is going, but if we have, say $10,000 to invest in the Forex, it is best to not invest more than 5%, some Forex professionals will even say, no more than 1% of our pot should go into any one currency at a time.
My own system of investing is a simple one and is not based on any rule of purchase. Unless I know a company thoroughly and how much of its stock is out and how much overhanging the market in the form of options or founders' stock, I do not usually invest. I have found that without securing as much inside information about a company as I can, I run a great risk. Inside information comes directly from the management or one step removed from the management. Hearsay information is of little use, particularly that which comes from brokers, unless the broker knows the management and gets his information directly from it.