The best investors know stock returns are never a matter of certainty; rather, they depend on filling your portfolio with high probabilities of success, some of which will fail, with the winners hopefully making enough of a difference to meet your financial goals.
The inexistence of a free lunch in investing is why due diligence plays such a key role in your stock market experience. All it takes are a few flyers gone wrong to spook someone into instruments like bonds, money markets and high-yield savings accounts, all of them paling in comparison to stocks’ long-term return of about 5 per cent above inflation from 1900-2018.
To build a portfolio of high-conviction positions, an investor must first compile a list of stocks whose initial attractiveness merits a deeper look. But given the thousands of issuers currently trading on major Canadian exchanges, the task is easier said than done.
This is why, to end…
