Irrespective of some blogs I posted criticizing Barron’s, I recommend reading it. My criticism was directed at recommendations they made and the concept of investing in individual stocks or bond funds, rather than through stock mutual funds or individual bonds. However, each of its articles are well written, well researched, well thought out and fully worth reading.
I believe it is virtually impossible to succeed in any endeavor without efforts to learn about what you are doing. Some get lucky some of the time, but for consistency, you need some knowledge and the ability to apply it to actions. Part of that knowledge comes from reading news stories, periodicals and books, attending lectures, watching news programs, having a general awareness and being able to process accumulated information.
Crucial to a chance at success is understanding what the stock market represents and why people invest in it. I believe investing in the stock market is to be able to share in the growth of the U.S. economy and certain aspects of the international market over long periods of time with the expectation that the stock market would reflect that growth; and also to receive dividends while waiting for that growth; and that the market’s growth will also be manifested by increasing dividend payments.
You should also understand that the stock market is not “the stock market.” It is not a tangible thing. It is an illusory “thing” that is comprised of huge numbers of transactions for thousands of individual stocks that take place every minute of every hour of every day that there are stock trades. Drilling down, it is the accumulated activity of individual stocks representing simultaneous, but not equal, amounts of optimism and pessimism by investors. Barron’s performs a public service with the reporting on individual companies along with the quality inherent in each article. I feel that these articles, and similar ones, provide information about the economy as seen through the lens of individual companies better than articles about “the stock market.”
Read Barron’s and the other publications providing timely news and information about companies and use that information as part of your process to come up with an opinion about the economy and how it is moving and should move over the long term which is what your plans should be about. It is important for you to be informed and develop your own opinion about the future strength of the economy and how that strength will be reflected in the values and dividends of stocks that you would own in a well-diversified portfolio.
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