EP41: Don't Make These Common Investing Mistakes

What if you could sidestep the common investing mistakes that plague most new investors? This episode promises to arm you with the knowledge needed to avoid such pitfalls, like buying high and selling low, or neglecting to consider investment fees. I unravel the basics of smart investing, explaining what stocks represent (ownership in a company), and the significance of dividends (your share of the company's profits).

Ever wondered why it's not always wise to buy a stock at its historical high? I also scrutinize investment fees, comparing one-time trading fees to annual fees, and breaking down how the management expense ratio can impact your investment over the long run.

I cover the following topics in this episode:
- Investing without knowledge
- Buying stocks at high prices
- Selling stocks at low prices
- Not paying attention to fees

Watch till the end to get 10% off coupon code for Simply Investing.

Learn more at: https://www.simplyinvesting.com/

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

In this episode, I cover the four most common investing mistakes that could be costing you thousands of dollars. Hi, my name is Kanwal Sarai and welcome to the Simply Investing Dividend Podcast. In this episode, we're going to cover four topics the four investing common investing mistakes. The first investing mistake that I see a lot of people making is investing without knowledge or education in investing, so we're going to cover that first. Then we're going to look at mistake number two, which is buying high. So buying stock prices, buying stocks when the prices are high Okay, so that's important. We're going to take a look at that. Next, we're going to look at mistake number three selling when the stock price is low. And after that, mistake number four not paying attention to fees, especially when it comes to investing. So let's get started with investing. Mistake number one, which is investing without knowledge or education so let's take a look at this. I'm going to ask you this question Would you get into an airplane without any knowledge of flying and fly?

Speaker 1: 1:23

Try to fly an airplane by yourself? Of course not. You wouldn't do that without first learning about aviation, learning about the plane and learning how to fly. Next question, which is similar would you get into a car without having any knowledge of driving and without having any knowledge of how to start the car, how to stop, how to use the brake pedal, how to accelerate, how to use the steering. You wouldn't do that. You would first learn, either from someone else or from some taking some driving lessons would first learn how to drive before you got behind the wheel of a car. And the last question, which is again similar would you build an entire house by yourself without any knowledge of building materials or building construction, without knowing the difference between a load bearing wall or an interior partition? Right, of course not. You wouldn't do that. You would get the knowledge first and get the education first. Before you were starting to build a house, drive a car for the first time or even fly a plane. So the same thing happens when it comes to investing. You have to have that knowledge first and foremost and that education.

Speaker 1: 2:48

Because I see a lot of people you know I've been doing this for over 22 years I see a lot of people will just download an app on their phone and start buying stocks, start buying and selling stocks, and I know it's really easy having that app on your phone. It allows you to do that very easy with just a couple of clicks here and there and you can buy stocks easily. But when you do that without having knowledge or education about what you're doing, that's what's going to get you into trouble, and that's the number one mistake that I see, which is a common mistake among investors. Now here's the good news. Okay, investing is not rocket science. You don't need a fancy degree in accounting or economics or in finance in order to buy and sell stocks, in order to be a successful investor. So I've been doing this for over 22 years and I don't have any advanced degrees in accounting, finance or economics. That was the other one I was looking for. Okay, it's not rocket science. The key is to understand the basics. That's where you start and then you can start building up your knowledge from there. So I'm going to share some of the basics with you right now in this episode.

Speaker 1: 4:10

So, for example, what is a stock or a share? A stock or a share represents Ownership in a company. So if we take a look at Walmart, for example, they have a little over 2.6 billion shares Outstanding all over the world. If you were to buy all of the shares, you would own the entire company. Now, if you only bought five shares, ten shares or a hundred shares, you are still considered part owner of the company and as part owner of the company, you're entitled to share in the profits of that company, and those profits come to you in the form of dividends. That's just a fancy name for your share of the profits.

Speaker 1: 4:59

So, for example, if a company is giving out a dividend of one dollar per share per year and you own a Thousand shares in this company, you will receive a thousand dollars every year for as long as you own those shares and as long as the company continues to pay the dividend, and the dividend gets deposited directly into your trading account as cash. So then you can spend that money if you wish, or you can reinvest it, and as a dividend investor, I like to reinvest that money into other stocks that pay dividends. So now I can make even more money. Now this is important the dividends will come to you Regardless of the stock price and we'll see a little later on in this episode. Stock prices go up and down all the time but as long as the company is Paying you a dividend of one dollar per share and you own those shares and in this case, a thousand shares, you'll receive a thousand dollars every year for as long as you own those shares and as long as the company continues to pay the dividend. So stock prices can't go up and down, the stock market can go up and down, but you will continue to receive those dividends. Now, for example, coca-cola has been consecutively increasing its dividends to the shareholders for over 50 years. Johnson and Johnson also over 50 years. Procter and Gamble again over 50 years of consecutive Dividend increases. So think about how many market crashes we've had, how many recessions we've had in the last 50 years, but companies like these have continued to pay the shareholders. Every single year in fact, it's every quarter the dividend gets paid out and Every year the companies have been increasing the dividend. When the dividend goes up, that's more money in your pocket. So, as a dividend investor, that's a good thing.

Speaker 1: 6:55

Now here's a couple of other things you want to keep in. Keep in mind, right, because this topic here we're talking about investing without knowledge or education. So the other thing you want to look at is, before you invest a single penny, how is the company that you're thinking about buying investing in? How is that company making money? Now, if you can't answer that question, then you probably should not be investing any money into that stock or share. The next thing you want to look at is the company profitable, right? Take a look at the track record. Take a look at the last five, ten, fifteen, twenty years. Has the company Consistently made money or have they consistently lost money? If the company is losing money, probably don't want to invest in that. So this is really easy. We look at earnings right. They call it earnings per share or EPS. That's really easy to look it up. Like I said, this isn't rocket science and Once you understand the basics then you can make really good decisions and become a successful investor.

Speaker 1: 8:06

Then you want to look at the debt. Is the company have low debt or high debt? Right, again it. You don't have to be a rocket science to figure out. Well, a company that has a debt of five percent is Probably in a good financial situation versus a company that has a debt of 900% right, all things considered, equal. So if you're looking at five percent debt for company a, 900% debt for company B, well, company a is probably a better stock to consider for investing.

Speaker 1: 8:41

Can the company afford to pay the dividend? So we look at the payout ratio. Right, we typically look at companies with a payout ratio of 75% or less. Again, if the payout ratio is to 300%, meaning I'll give you a quick example a company had earned that's the profits a $1 per share and they paid a dividend of $3 per share. That doesn't make any sense. How can the company pay the shareholders $3 per share Dividend, which is essentially cash, but the company only made a dollar per share profit. So that doesn't make any sense. The payout ratio here is 300%. So that's really easy to look at the payout ratio before you invest in any company.

Speaker 1: 9:24

And next, is the stock priced low or is it priced high? So there's a quick way to figure that out. We'll talk about stock high and low prices a little later in this episode. So I've just given you a couple of things here. Right, we've got five bullet points on the screen. That's just a couple of things to look at. We're just looking at the basics for now, and that's going to help you become a better investor.

Speaker 1: 9:49

Now the other thing I want to pass on to you is avoid the noise. There is a tremendous amount of noise on social media, on television, on the radio, everywhere you go on the internet. Everybody has an opinion about any stock anywhere in the world. So avoid that noise because it's just going to confuse. You Stick to the basics, stick to the fundamentals. So where can you get investing knowledge? So there's a couple of places. You can learn from books, you can learn from online courses, or you can Learn from a mentor or someone who has been doing this for you know 10, 15, 20 years and learn from them and figure out and ask them the questions on how to get started with investing, how to invest and how to manage your money. So I'm gonna give you a couple of ideas in each one of those sort of three areas.

Speaker 1: 10:56

So if we want to look at some books, I recommend this one, the new buffetology, by Mary Buffett and David Clark. This is a great book. It's not too big, easy to understand, easy to read, and in the book they talk about how Warren Buffett Goes about evaluating companies. So how does he figure out whether to invest in one company over another? So that's a good book to get started with. The other one I'm gonna suggest is Dividends still don't lie. This is the sequel to the original book, which was called dividends don't lie.

Speaker 1: 11:34

This one's written by Kelly Wright. He worked very closely with Geraldine Wase. A lot of you may have heard of Benjamin Graham, who's considered the the father of value investing or the godfather of value investing. Geraldine Wase could be considered the godmother of a dividend investing. So this is a good book. Talks about dividends, how to Look at a company's track record and then how to figure out whether this is a good stock or share to invest. In.

Speaker 1: 12:06

The last book I'm gonna recommend for experienced investors and for people who are beyond DIY, which is do it yourself investors, because this is a very big book. It's written by Benjamin Graham, who was Warren Buffett's mentor and teacher at Columbia University. This book was written in 1939, so it is a very big book. It gets very technical. It may scare away a lot of people, but if you get through the first two books and you still want to learn more and Interested in that, then the intelligent investor is the Absolute guide on value investing.

Speaker 1: 12:45

Okay, after that we've got I've got a lot of resources out there for if anybody wants to get started to learn About how to become a dividend investor, how to evaluate you know which stocks to buy, which ones to avoid. So this podcast you're listening to or watching. Right now We've had we have over 40 episodes on my YouTube channel or wherever you get your Podcasts from, so take a look at, listen to those episodes, watch those episodes, and I have new episodes out every week, and every episode is Giving you the education and the knowledge, so they're informative. So check those out. The simply investing blog, which is on our website simply investing calm if you go to the blog, there's over 200 articles that I've written over the years. Again, every article is an education, educational article, which is giving you some knowledge on how to invest. So that's good. The simply investing course I'm gonna talk about a little later on, and so let's move on now to mistake.

Speaker 1: 13:52

Number two, which a lot of investors make is buying a stock when the price is high or, invertly, buying a stock when the price is high and, as I said before, stock prices go up and down all the time and you can see it up on the screen here. This is just an example. We're looking at Walmart. You can see the stock prices go up and down all the time. This is a period of what are we looking at? Almost two years, and you can see the price goes up and down Consistently, right, it's just, prices don't stay flat. So what you want to avoid here is Buying the stock when it's priced high, and you can see I've highlighted on the screen sort of the peaks where the price went up.

Speaker 1: 14:38

Right, that's what you want to avoid.

Speaker 1: 14:40

And the question is why? Why? What's wrong with buying a stock when it's priced high? So let's answer that question right now. So, like I said, prices go up and down and if you look on the screen here, you can see in this example, a Company is priced high when the stock is at $51 a share, because that's historically priced high at 51 and it's historically priced low when the share price is $14 a share. Now there's no point in buying this stock at $51 or at 52 or 55 or even $49, because you're buying it when it's already historically high. So the likelihood of it going even higher is Extremely low. So if you buy it at $51 or at 49 or 52, it's not going to go higher than that Right, based on the history. So you're not going to make much of a profit, if any. So you want to avoid buying the stock when it's at its peak Now. On the other hand, if you bought it when it was $14 and Then eventually it gets to its. You know the price goes up. Then you can sell it at. When it's at 40, 49, 50, you can sell it at a much higher price and that way you can Get a much bigger capital gain. Now for the stock to go from low to high Could take three months, could take six months, could take three years or five years.

Speaker 1: 16:15

Now here's the problem. When the price Starts to creep up and let's say it's over a period of one year or 18 months, the stock is going up. So if you were watching in your like hey was, last week it was $25, now it's 30. And then after that you're looking at you saying, well, the week before it was 30, now it's 38 dollars. Or you know, the couple of days ago it was $38, now it's $42.

Speaker 1: 16:44

And as you watch it over time it's human nature and a lot of investors get caught up into this is that's when you get caught up in the greed Right? Or you see your neighbors or your friends, at colleagues or at work or whoever you know, bragging about a stock that they bought for $40 and now it's trading at 50, or bragging that they bought it at $22 and now it's at $64. So it's easy to get caught up into that, thinking that the price has gone up for the last Three days, three weeks, three months or even three years. The price has gone up. There's there's no way it's gonna come down right, and that's a big mistake. And so that's where people get caught up in that momentum and get caught up in buying this stock when it's priced too high.

Speaker 1: 17:36

So what's the lesson here? Don't buy stocks, or I was gonna say stock or a share. Look, it means the same thing. When I say a stock or a share in this episode or any of my episodes, it means the exact same thing. So what's the lesson here? Don't buy when the stock price is high. It's as simple as that. And so what should you do? You should wait for the stock to go on sale. You should wait for the stock price to come down.

Speaker 1: 18:03

Take a look at anything in your life. Whether it's buying groceries, electronics, clothing, any of those things. You typically wait for things to go on sale. When they go on sale, you actually buy more, and when prices go up, you tend to wait. You said well, you know what? I'm gonna wait for this to to go on sale and then I'll buy some more.

Speaker 1: 18:22

The stock market is the only place in the world where people Buy more when the price is going up, and then they start selling and panicking when the price goes down, and that's the complete opposite. You don't buy your groceries that way, you don't buy your clothing that way, or your electronics or anything else. You don't do that. But in the stock market it's easy to get caught up. You get caught up in the hype and People start buying as the price is going up and then they start selling when the price is going down. So don't do this. You can see it up on the screen here. I've got it in big fonts. Do not do this. And this brings us to our next mistake, number three, which is people Generally will panic and start selling when the price is low. So that is our mistake number three.

Speaker 1: 19:18

So let's take a look at this now. I'm gonna ask you this question. Let's say you bought a stock when it was $25 a share and today the stock is now trading at $10 a share. How much money have you lost Now? I know a lot of you are starting to calculate the do the the math in your head. You're like okay, I bought it for $25. Now it's at 10, so I guess I lost $15. The answer is no 10, so I guess I lost $15. The answer is you haven't lost anything Because you haven't sold anything yet. As long as you still own those shares and If it's a dividend stock, you are still collecting dividends, the company is still paying you the dividends. So as long as you own those shares, you're still part owner of the company. So you bought a stock at $25, it's now trading at $10, you haven't lost anything if you didn't sell the shares, so just hold on to them. You only solidify your losses when you sell.

Speaker 1: 20:23

So the key here is not to panic, and I know it's not easy. If you're looking at a stock and every day the price is going down and it's going down, every week the price is going down, it's easy to panic and just to sell everything that you have. Now keep in mind stock market and stock prices go up and down all the time and you can see it here. We're looking at the SNP 500. That's sort of the global not the global, but the US the top 500 companies in the US. So it gives us a good idea of what the stock market is doing.

Speaker 1: 20:59

If you take a look at this, this is just a one year chart. One year you see the prices go up and down, up and down, and if you look at this graph on the screen, it's going to confuse people. You're like, well, am I making any money or am I just breaking even? What's going on? The key here is to zoom out a bit. One year is too short of a period to make any decisions Like is this a good thing or a bad thing? What's happening in the stock market? Are we in a recession or are we heading into a recession? Where are we at? Are we at the top? Are we at the bottom? What's going on? So if we zoom out a little bit and we go back 70 years now, you can see what the stock market has done over the last 70 years and you can see there is a trend. Of course, there's times when it goes down, there's periods when it does go down, but you can see the trend is going up. So the entire history of the stock market over the long term. So we're talking 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, 50 years. Over the long term, the market does provide good returns and the market goes up. So, again, the key here is don't panic.

Speaker 1: 22:19

So then, what do you do while stock prices are low? So you're holding on to a whole bunch of shares and stocks and you're watching them come down and you're wondering what do I do Now? Keep in mind the advice I'm going to give you here is it does not apply to crypto or growth stocks, or IPOs, or stocks that you bought on a whim because someone told you it was a good investment, or you read it online on the internet somewhere and you thought it was a good investment. This applies to quality stocks, where you've done your homework and they're profitable companies. They have a history of growing their dividend, okay, so you're holding on to those. So what do you do? What do you do with those shares? And now the price is down? Well, the answer is you wait. There is a lot of benefit in being patient, and here's the third point While you wait, you collect those dividends every quarter, just like clockwork, and I gave you the example before Coca-Cola over 50 years of consecutively increasing their dividends. Johnson and Johnson over 50 years of consecutively increasing their dividends. So what do you do when the market is down? You are patient, you wait and you collect dividends. I'll give you a quick example of the benefits of collecting dividends so you can see here and if you've watched previous episodes you might have seen this already, but this is my example I bought 185 shares of TRP back in 2000.

Speaker 1: 23:57

The stock price was $13.40. You can see, the dividend at the time was $0.80 a share. So if we take the dividend divided by my purchase price, you can see I was making a return of 5.9% that year. Okay, not a lot, but that's fine. The next year the company raised the dividend to $0.90 per share. So now we take $0.90 divided by my purchase price, now I'm making over 6.7% return on my initial investment. So that year, in 2001, I made $166 in dividends Again, not a lot of money.

Speaker 1: 24:36

And my initial investment you can see it up on the screen 185 shares multiplied by my purchase price was $2,479. That was my initial investment. The company has increased its dividend every single year since I've owned it and you can see that I've received over $8,000 in dividends. Now, remember, my initial investment was $2,479. Just by holding on to those shares, I've received over $8,000 in dividends. Now, it's taken a lot of time, taken many years. But you can see the dividend today is $3. It's actually over $0.360. We're showing the dividend from 2022. Let's just go with the number from last year, so $3.60 dividend divided by my purchase price and you can see that the return on the investment is now over 26%. I can't make 26% return anywhere in a term deposit, in a bank account, in a savings account or in a bond. So this is a great return and the company has more than doubled my investment.

Speaker 1: 25:53

And I don't know what the stock is trading at today. I haven't looked at it. Let's say it's at $40 a share. Do I care if it goes to $30 tomorrow? No, do I care if it goes to $20 tomorrow? No, I've already more than made up my money. So when the market is down, okay, be patient. When it comes to dividend investing, I'm going to leave you with this. Keep calm and carry on.

Speaker 1: 26:19

Okay, let's move on to mistake number four. Mistake number four is not paying attention to fees. Now you can see up on the screen here mutual funds, index funds, etfs all carry a fee and this is an annual fee. It's not a one-time fee, it's an annual fee. A mutual fund anywhere from 1.5 to 3% a year annual fee. Index fund 0.5% to 1.5%. Etfs 0.03% to 1%. This is an annual fee that's built into those funds and that fee gets deducted automatically from your account. Whether the fund makes money or it doesn't make any money or it loses money, the fee will still come out.

Speaker 1: 27:04

Now, with stocks, there is a fee. It's a commission fee. It's a trading fee. So some apps now will allow you to buy stocks and sell stocks with zero commission. So then there is no fee. Some companies will charge you $5 a trade or $10 a trade, but that's a one-time fee. So if I'm going to buy I don't know 25 shares in Walmart, I may pay a $5 trading fee, a commission, but that's one time. Then I'm going to hold on to those shares for the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years. There is no other fee on top of that. So that's the difference A one-time fee $5, $10 or zero versus an annual fee which is going to be charged every single year.

Speaker 1: 27:55

Let's take a look at a quick example. So I'm going to show you four different fees. We'll start at 2%, then we'll go to 1%, then we'll go to 0.5% and then we'll go to 0.05%. So these numbers seem very low. And if you're starting with a small amount let's say $5,000 or $1,000 to invest, the fees are going to seem very small. And if you're only looking at the first year, absolutely the numbers seem insignificant. For example, if you invest $5,000 at a 2% MER management expense ratio, at a 2% fee, after one year you're going to spend $100 in fees That'll get deducted automatically from your account.

Speaker 1: 28:43

Now, if you have the same $5,000 and the fee is only 1% a year, well then it's only going to cost you $50. And let's go down to the lowest fee, which is 0.05%. On a $5,000 investment, that's $2.50. So it doesn't seem like a lot, right? The numbers are low and your initial investment, like I said, could be $1,000, $5,000, doesn't seem like a lot. However, the true cost is going to be much different and that's going to depend on four things the amount of money you invest initially.

Speaker 1: 29:19

Then it's going to we're going to look at your continued contributions, right? So most people invest regularly, every paycheck, every month, every year you invest regularly. Then the rate of return. And then time. So I'm going to give you an example on the next slide.

Speaker 1: 29:38

So I'm going to make some assumptions here. So we're going to assume that you're investing initially $500,000. Now I know a lot of people have said that's a big amount and it is for most people. In this example, I want to show you the difference between investing a small amount and then investing a large amount and to see what the fees come out to be. So I'm making a lot of assumptions here, of course, and later on I'm going to give you a link and you can go in there and put your own numbers in there. But I'm making an assumption here.

Speaker 1: 30:10

This is typically it's going to be a working professional, someone who's in their mid 40s, 45, 47, 48 years of age, along with their spouse or partner. And this is taking everything into account the 401k, ira or, if you're in Canada, we've got the RRSP, the TFSA. Put everything together yourself, your spouse, your partner, everything together. You've been already working for 20, 30 years as a working professional, and so $500,000 is a good average amount to start with. So let's say today you've got that much money sitting in all your different accounts and then let's assume you're going to be contributing $500 a month. Again, it could be $50 a month, $10, $20.

Speaker 1: 31:01

In this example I'm going to use $500. Rate of return I'm going to put 8.5%. If you look at any of the books, the stock market has returned over the long term anywhere from 10 to 11% a year. So I'm going to put 8.5% here and then we're going to look at what happens to those fees after 25 years and 45 years. So let's take a look.

Speaker 1: 31:24

We start with a $500,000 investment, the MER. The fee is 2% a year. After 25 years, you will lose over $1.5 million in fees and you can see that up on the screen. After 45 years, you will lose over $12.5 million dollars in fees. I'm going to say that again $12.5 million dollars in fees. Now, sure that $500,000 you've invested has grown over the last 45 years, for sure, but that doesn't negate the fact that you will pay over $12 million dollars in fees. Now on the screen, at the bottom of the screen, there's a link, our good friends there at nerdwalletcom. They have a mutual fund calculator. That's where I got all the numbers you put in all of. Put in your personal numbers in there and you will see the cost of the fees to your portfolio over time.

Speaker 1: 32:23

Okay, so I'm showing the fees at 1% annual MER. Well, after 25 years, you're going to lose over $860,000. After 45 years, you're going to lose over $7.4 million dollars, okay. And then up on the screen I have 0.5% fee. Again, you're looking at over $450,000 dollars in fees. After 25 years. After 45 years, you're looking at $4.1 million dollars lost to fees. Let's take a look at the very last row on the screen. So again, we're starting with $500,000. The MER is going to be 0.05%, so that is fairly low. After 25 years, you're looking at spending over $48,000 dollars in fees. After 45 years, that's $449,000 in fees. So I don't know about you, but I could certainly use an extra $449,000 in my life. So the fees do add up.

Speaker 1: 33:23

Now for more information on this, we go into more detail. Go back and take a look at episode 38. So I cover that entire episode talks about fees and the impact of fees on your investments. So please go ahead and take a look at that, okay.

Speaker 1: 33:40

So for today's episode, we have covered the four common investing mistakes. Mistake number one investing without any knowledge or education and just buying stocks just because somebody said it was a good idea. Mistake number two buying when the price is too high. Mistake number three selling when the price is low. And mistake number four not paying attention to those fees, especially in those mutual funds, index funds and ETFs, because they are going to eat away at your savings over the long term.

Speaker 1: 34:15

So then, what do we do then? What is our approach to investing? And my approach and that's what I've been teaching and that's what I've been practicing over the last 22 years is how to invest safely and reliably over the long term, regardless of what happens in the stock market. So how do we do that? We focus on quality dividend stocks. So not just any stock has to be a dividend stock. Not just any dividend stock has to be a quality stock, and not at any price when they are priced low, because stock prices go up and down all the time. So how do you know when you're looking at a stock if it's a quality dividend stock and how do you know when it's under valued?

Speaker 1: 34:57

So for that I've created what I call the 12 rules of simply investing. You can see them up on the screen here For those of you that are interested. I cover these in more detail in the simply investing course, but for now, if you're listening to the audio version, I'm gonna go through the 12 rules here, and the key here is you only invest in a stock or in a company when it passes all of the 12 rules, not just eight out of the 12, or nine out of the 12 has to pass all of the 12. If it fails one rule, skip it, move on to something else. So 12 rules of simply investing. Rule number one do you understand how the company is making money? If you don't, skip it, move on to something else.

Speaker 1: 35:41

Rule number two 20 years from now, will people still need its products and services? Rule number three does the company have a low cost competitive advantage? Rule number four is the company recession proof? Rule number five is it profitable? Rule number six does it grow its dividend? Rule number seven can it afford to pay the dividend? Rule number eight is the debt less than 70%? Rule number nine we want to avoid any company with any recent dividend cuts. Rule number 10, does it buy back its own shares? Rule number 11 is the stock priced low? So we check for three things in there. In rule number 11, we're gonna look at the PE ratio. We're gonna compare the current dividend yield to its 20 year average dividend yield and then we're gonna look at the PB ratio, the price to book value. So rule number 11 is gonna tell us if the stock is priced low or it's priced high. And rule number 12, keep your emotions out of investing.

Speaker 1: 36:37

I've designed these rules and I've used them over the last 22 years to save you time and to minimize your risk, because you work hard for your money and you don't wanna put it in some place where it's gonna be at a very high risk. Remember, we wanna grow our investments safely and reliably over the long term. So, like I said before, if you're interested, I cover this in detail. I show you in the course how to apply these 12 rules to any stock anywhere in the world. It's an online course, self-paced. I've got 10 modules, so we cover the basics. We touched on some of them in today's episode, but we cover all of the basics. Then I cover the 12 rules. Then I show you how to apply the 12 rules and I give you a spreadsheet that you can use to fill in the data for any stock anywhere in the world. Then I show you how to use the Simply Investing platform. I show you how to place your first stock order, step by step, and I share my screen with you and so you get to see how to place your first stock order. I also show you how to build and track your portfolio and then when to sell. That is a very important topic. It's important to know when to buy, but it's just as important to know when to sell and then reducing your fees and risk. So we go into more detail on that. Then I'm gonna give you an action plan to get started right away, and then I answer your frequently asked questions. So that's all covered in the course.

Speaker 1: 38:07

For those of you that are interested, I've also spent three years building a platform from the ground up. It's a web application and it applies these rules to over 6,000 companies in the US and in Canada every single day. So you just log into the platform and it'll show you which companies to avoid and which ones to consider. It shows you which companies pass all of the rules and which ones fail some of the rules, and you can see all of that very quickly.

Speaker 1: 38:36

If you're watching this episode or listening to it, you may wanna write down the coupon code save10, s-a-v-e-10. This will save you 10% on all of our products and services. So on the course, you can save 10%. On the platform, you can save 10%, and I also do coaching calls and personal assessments so you can speak with me. We do a Zoom call for an hour. I will also review your holdings currently and show you what your fees are today and what you can do to improve your returns, and so you can use the coupon code for that as well S-A-V-E-10. So for more information, take a look at our website, simplyinvestingcom. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to hit the subscribe button and hit the like button as well. Thank you for watching.