Safe Dividend Investing
In 2000, I lost $300,000 in mutual funds that an investment advisor had put my lifesavings into.... I lost it because I had entrusted it to an industry that does not educate investors nor encourage them to look closely at what that industry is doing with their money..... I set out to find a better, safer way to invest..... My podcasts relate to what I learned in creating a generous, reliable income and in growing my wealth.... A few of the more important lessons I learned and explore are:.... (1) It is critical that you become a self-directed investor.....(2) If you can not easily measure the risk and potential in an investment, then do not invest in it. This excludes from your portfolio bundled investment devices, like mutual funds, ETFs and Index funds,..... (3) Financially strong companies who have paid “good dividends” for decades will continue to stay strong and continue to pay good dividends because it is both part of their "character" and in their executives selfish interest.....(4) Diversification is critical. Investing equally in the best 20 strong dividend stocks is the ideal.....A portfolio of 20 limits your risk in any one stock to 5% of your wealth..... No matter how strong you think a stock is, do not fall in love with it..... I have lived very well off my steady dividend income for 18 years, through two market crashes and one pandemic. I have watched my portfolio’s capital more than triple from where I started, despite taking out a generous dividend income every year to live on... In charts, for my second investment book,(Safer Better Dividend Investing), I spent months scoring all 628 dividend stocks paying dividends of 6% or greater traded on the TSX, NYSE and the NASDAQ. I discovered dozens of stocks that can provide not only a generous dividend income but outstanding capital growth.....Financial independence is realizable for careful, patient, dividend investors.
Safe Dividend Investing
Podcast 280 - NOW, IS THE TIME TO OPEN A SELF-DIRECTED INVESTMENT ACCOUNT
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Welcome to Safe Dividend Investing’s Podcast # 280on June 20th of 2026.
This podcast is directed at those who frequently listen to my podcasts and even read my, and other writers' investment books. While these listeners may recognize that their income and wealth could be much greater if they were self-directed investors, they fear the idea of testing the waters and actually building a self-directed investment account.
Anything you have never done before can initially be intimidating - especially if it involves money. However, major banks have made creating a self-directed investment account easy and quick. They put you in total control of your self-directed account.
All the money you may now be paying a financial advisor can be saved. Over several years this can add up to tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars that is better invested making you money.
Don't you want to know exactly what you are invested in and why you are invested in it? It will not be like investing in a mutual fund where you have only a vague idea of what your money is invested in and without having direct access to it. With a self-directed investment account, you are in total control.
For those who keep their life savings in a bank saving account where it is making one percent in interest, you could be averaging an annual 7% dividend return each year plus a gain of 10% of more in the share price of the strong stocks you add to your portfolio. That dividend income keeps coming in even during the inevitable market crashes that you wait. relax while you watch your share prices recover.
What motivated me to become a self-directed investor was seeing the mutual funds my investment advisor put my money into lose $300,000 in three years. I feared for my retirement and did not buy his explanation that this is just the way things are in the stock market. That was over 20 years ago.
The value of my portfolio and the dividend income has never stopped growing. You do not have to be a genius to reap the benefits of your own portfolio. Now is a good time to become an independent investor?
IAN .
Ian Duncan MacDonald
Author and Commercial Risk Consultant,
President of Informus Inc
2 Vista Humber Drive
Toronto, Ontario
Canada, M9P 3R7
Toronto Telephone - 416-245-4994
imacd@informus.ca
Podcast 280
Safe Dividend Investing
2o June 2026
Greetings to investors all around the world. Welcome to Safe Dividend Investing’s Podcast #280, recorded on June 20 of 2026. My name is Ian Duncan MacDonald. I am the author of seven investment books.
To learn more about my investment books, visit www.amazon.com and do a search for "Ian Duncan MacDonald books”. At Amazon you can find sample chapters and reviews by investors who have benefited from the seven books.
This week’s podcast is for all those who have been listening to my weekly podcasts and perhaps reading one of more of my investment books, but they have yet to leap into opening a self-directed investment trading account. Some have debated about buying their own stocks and managing their own portfolio of stocks for years however the fear of the unknown and of making a mistake in which stocks they choose has stopped them from doing it. They may find the actual online stock mechanics of buying and paying for the stock intimidating.
The result is that they continue read investment books and listen to podcasts, but their money remains in their bank savings accounts losing about 3.5% of its buying power every year to inflation.
Others avoid taking the leap in buying that first stock by blindly entrusting their life savings to an investment advisor to invest for them. These investors will have little idea as to what the investment advisor has invested their money in or whether the advisor’s choices will provide a growing wealth and income for them when they retire.
There are no free lunches in life, if you read my first book “Income and Wealth from Self-Directed Investing”, you follow Miss Innocent’s journey from foolishly worshipping her investment advisor to the realization that he was sucking out 2.5% of the value of her million-dollar portfolio every year for ten years. The investment advisor was happy. His cut of her portfolio that he was taking out of it was giving him $26,000 a year for holding Miss Innocent’s hand a few times each year and assuring her that things would improve. Over the ten years she used his services, he received about $250,000. That amount of money could have added tens of thousands of dollars in dividend income to Miss Innocent’s portfolio instead of shrinking the portfolio.
Miss Innocent was a friend. She asked me to look at her portfolio. Its initial value of $1,300,000 had now dropped down below $1,000,000. She was 80 years old and greatly concerned that she would be left penniless long before she reached 90 years of age. This was almost 10 years ago. She is rapidly approaching 90.
At 80 years of age, she followed my advice and opened an on-line self-directed stock trading account. I was surprised how quickly she adapted to using the IDM stock scoring software I had developed for myself to choose financially strong, high dividend paying stocks. Using the software, she chose and purchased everyone of the 20 stocks for her self-directed portfolio. Each stock was paying a dividend yield of more than 5%. Each stock had a score exceeding 50 out of a possible 100. Within two years she had recovered the $300,000 lost under the investment visor’s management. Not having him taking his 2.6% of the value of her portfolio each year immediately doubled her monthly income.
Ten years later her portfolio is still growing. She tells me that she has such confidence in her stocks that she often goes for weeks without looking at them.
She is the one who pushed me to write the first of my seven investment books and to offer my stock scoring software free to the book buyers.
If Miss Innocent can achieve peace and financial independence, so can you. Start slow, with a nominal amount of money to become comfortable with the easy steps.
What is the first step? You need a personal computer and a checking account with a major bank. That, checking account identifies you to your bank when you sign into their online banking services.
Assuming your bank is like other banks, when you sign in you probably immediately see the heading “Products”. If you click on “Products” a new heading should appear directing, you to the bank’s “Personal Investing” services.
Among the several services offered under “Personal Investing” should be the heading “Choose a registered plan or non-registered plan”. Click on the non-registered plan because at this stage you are not yet into special tax-free stock investment services. That is something that can wait until later.
Also, ignore the “book an appointment” button. This is the bank’s marketing ploy to put you in the clutches of one of their full-service investment advisors who will feed on your portfolio like the one that fed on Miss Innocent’s million dollar “full service” portfolio.
Out of dozens of options now presented to you, click on the one that reads “Trade and invest yourself with our direct investing service”.
This will take you to a service with a title like “invest on your own”. Clicking on that takes you to “Trade for Free”. You are now walked through the process of opening your investment account.
You now choose that you want to open a “cash account”. This means the bank will only allow you to buy a stock if you have enough cash in your investment account to pay for the stock you wish to purchase. The source of that cash is the money you will transfer into it from your checking account with the bank. This limits you to only being able to buy what you have cash to pay for. It protects you from buying more than you intended to spend on a stock.
To establish the link between your checking account and your stock trading account, you now click on the “open an account’ tab.
When this account opens you must now complete the legal requirements of providing proof that you are resident in the country. Since you already have a checking account with the bank, this should already have been established. You must also provide a government issued work ID number. In some countries this would be called a social insurance number. The personal email address to establish the transfer of data between you and the bank is also required.
To confirm this set up, the bank will then ask you to log into your existing checking account with your usual bank password. Within a few minutes you will now have a stock trading account set up.
There will be a help number for you to phone for assistance from the bank if you have questions. The final step is for you to transfer cash from your checking account to the new investment account.
You are now ready to go into your investment account and choose the first stock to add to your portfolio from the thousands of stocks available
To find that stock you locatr the Research tab on your trading screen. When you click on it you will see a dozen selection options. Under “tools” you should see an option for “Screeners”. This tool will quickly and easily reduce the thousands of stocks you could purchase down to the few that you can score and choose from.
There are several prepackaged stock selector choice options grouped together to save you the time of having to create them from scratch. Choose a simple option that may be identified as “Top Dividends” since we are looking for stocks paying dividend yields between 5% and 9%. Inside this packaged option you might find 500 stocks already pre-selected, but whose dividend yields may be too high or too low.
The selection criteria in this tab can be adjusted to the ideal range of dividend yield you would like to see. In addition, you can also adjust several other options like the “price range” of the stocks that you wish to buy. Your objective is to narrow your selection down to a workable number.
The next step to is to score those few you have chosen using the IDM stock scoring software.
The highest score I have ever seen out of thousands I have scored was an 85. The lowest was a 3. I personally avoid stocks scoring under 50. The stock with the highest score might be your best choice.
The objective is for you to choose 20 strong high dividend stocks for the safety that comes with portfolio diversity. 20 stocks are few enough not to overwhelm you ability to build and monitor the portfolio periodically for years to come.
To buy your stock you now go to the “Trading” tab on the main page and then choose the “stocks” tab. A screen appears where you enter the stock symbol or the name of the stock you wish to buy. You click on the “Buy” tab to indicate what you want done and then enter the number of shares you want and the price you are willing to pay for those shares.
Before entering you price you would have checked to see what price the stock is currently being sold for. The final choice is setting how long you will be offering your purchase price. If the price is not acceptable to those who are selling that stock, you would keep raising the price until you find a share owner willing to sell it to you at the price you post.
Just before posting your order, you must indicate that you have approved your purchase order. Note that the system will not be process your order if you do not have enough cash in your trading account to pay for what you are ordering.
The last step is entering your secret trading password to initiate the order. If the order is accepted, you are now the owner of those shares. The money in your cash account is immediately deducted to pay the seller. It may take a day for the shares to show up in you trading account.
Before placing your order further verify the stock’s strength by looking back at 10 or more years of the stock’s share prices and its dividend payouts. This data should appear under the tab “charts” within the major heading of “Research” and its subheading of “Overview” . In the charts you want to see ever rising share prices and dividend payouts by the stock you intend to purchase. Research is also where you find all the 11facts under the “Overview” heading to be entered into the scoring software for that stock.
Choosing additional stocks is now easy since you now understand the process. In each of my books I go into more detail with illustrations showing the stock buying process. The book also explains the importance of all the eleven elements used to score a stock.
I look forward to hearing how your portfolio has grown in the next 12 months.
As an aside, some of you may be interested in learning I just posted my latest novel “The Fifty-First State in the Amazon book store.
That’s all for this week.