The Seven Bad Ways to Invest

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If your investment choosing is based on you being able to predict the future, you're not going to have good results. A fifth bad way of investing is to invest in things you don't understand. You need to understand what those characteristics are because if you don't, you don't really have any business investing in it. And here's a seventh bad way of trading investing like gambling, jumping in and out of various investments on feelings, hunches, or headlines. Or looking at spurious correlations.

In this episode we discuss how NOT to choose investments and how to employ a good process to analyze an investment. We adopt the process of David Stein's 10 Questions To Master Successful Investing and apply it to PFF, an exchange-traded fund of preferred stock.

Links:

Investopedia Article -- "How Does Preferred Stock Work?": https://www.investopedia.com/articles/stocks/06/preferredstock.asp#:~:text=Preferreds%20are%20issued%20with%20a,of%20the%20preferred%20shares%20falls.

Ishares description of PFF: https://www.ishares.com/us/products/239826/ishares-us-preferred-stock-etf

Portfolio Visualizer's Asset Correlation Analyzer: https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/asset-correlations

"Money for the Rest of Us: 10 Questions To Master Successful Investing": https://moneyfortherestofus.com/how-to-invest-book/

The 10 Questions To Ask When Considering An Investment:
1. What is it?
2. Is it an investment, a speculation, or a gamble?
3. What is the upside?
4. What is the downside?
5. Who is on the other side of the trade?
6. What is the investment vehicle?
7. What does it take to be successful?
8. Who is getting a cut?
9. How does it impact your portfolio?
10. Should you invest?