1. Do not spread your money too thin.

My friend has a little over $200,000 invested in stock market through 27 different Mutual funds. In my opinion, 27 Mutual funds is 27 too many collecting load fees, management fees, commission fees, operating and advertising fees. Diversity is important, but just as important is over-diversification. Also, in my opinion, $200,000 should not be put into more than 12 stocks, let alone 27 different Mutual funds.

2. Do not pay commission fees to purchase a stock.

If you are going to invest your hard earned dollars into a company, least company could do is provide you a way to invest in their company commission free – and they do!

3.Only purchase those companies that pay a dividend.

The same company that you invest in commission free should also offer you another incentive for you to invest – a dividend for use of your money.

4. Only purchase those companies that have a history of raising their dividend every year.

The same company should continue rewarding you for your faith in their company by increasing amount of their dividend every year. Rising dividends are also proof that company is doing something right.

5. Dollar-cost average into each stock position.

By dollar-cost averaging (buying same stock at different prices through years) you’ll never pay too much for company’s stock, even if initial purchase is at a 52 week high. Have all dividends from each company rolled back into more shares of each company, until retirement. The companies you invest in should do this for you, automatically, commission free.

6. Forget making a profit; instead focus on income provided from your stock portfolio.

And then there are those words in English language where there meaning appears to be backward, so to speak - like parkway and driveway. When my car is parked at home, I would think it would be parked on, well, a parkway - and when I’m on road driving somewhere, I would think I’d be driving on a – a driveway.

In stock market world, I think word analyst is a perfect word in English language and stockbroker sounds right to me, too. And this leads me to what I call ‘brainwashing mantras’ of Wall Street.

The brainwashing mantras of Wall Street may take form of a number, such as a stock rating of 1, 2, 3 etc. Or mantras may be a star, 1 star, 2 stars etc. The mantras may be a word or a group of words- attractive, unattractive, neutral, market perform, market out-perform, market under-perform, market under-weight, market equal weight, market over-weight, sector perform, strong buy, buy, sell, strong sell.

These mantras are so ingrained in Wall Street and investor’s minds that they have created multi-billion dollar industries. There are other types of mantras, such as RSI (relative strength index-a trading volume indicator), Bollinger Bands (named after its creator John Bollinger (he use to be a regular on CNBC) and bands deal with channels a stock trades in, in relation to its ‘moving average’- another mantra), Stochastics (used to tell if a stock is 75 % overbought - too many people have been buying) or 25% oversold (too many people have been selling), Momentum, MACD Convergence/Divergence- price of stock, up or down, in relation to its moving average), 50 day, 200 day moving averages, triple bottoms and tops, pendants, flags, bear and bull markets, head and shoulders formations, double bottoms, P/E ratios etc, etc, etc, etc.

All these mantras serve a purpose (and if you’re inclined to trade in market they are, I admit, useful tools) - they create commissions.

And in my opinion, have no meaning what-so-ever for long-term, dollar-cost averaging, buying investor of company’s shares, free of commission charges, whose companies raise their dividend every year, with investor’s idea or purpose being to provide an 85% tax-free income, through ever-increasing dividends for rest of their lives, no matter what price of stock at any given time in market place may be. (Whew! What a sentence!)