Podcast 41 --BENEFIT OF MUTUAL FUNDS OVER RATED - BUY BACKS ARE A SCAM

Send a textWelcome to Safe Dividend Investing’s Podcast # 266 on March 14th of 2026. My name is Ian Duncan MacDonald, and I am the author of 7 investment books. My seventh investment book, Achieving Financial Independence Safely - 200 NYSE Stocks Analyzed and Scored" became available January 3rd on Amazon. You can easily find it by searching in Amazon or Google for "Ian Duncan MacDonald books". For more information on all my books, stock scoring software and podcasts go to www.informus.caIn this week's podcast I review what options exist when you are no longer able to manage your stock portfolio.In my March 7th podcast I was once again not very complimentary of investment advisors. Being a self-directed investor is seen as being a better, safer and more cost-efficient method of investing than placing your portfolio in the hands of an investment advisor. However, what happens when your advanced age eventually makes self-directed management of your investment portfolio no longer possible? One of the listeners to that podcast responded with a good question.  He asked, if you cannot trust investment advisors employed by large financial institutions to manage your stock portfolio then who would you trust to handle your stock portfolio?Until this listener raised this question with me, I had never considered what I would do if my wife and my children predeceased me and I needed someone to manage my affairs if I became incapacitated. I know from experience that I do not trust investment advisors employed by a large financial institution. As well, the lawyers and accountants I have dealt with knew little about commercial risk and judging the potential of stocks.What professional would I then not hesitate to entrust the management of my stock portfolio to? I explain in this podcast that I would choose a trustee in bankruptcy and why I would do so. This would be a fiduciary role independent from their bankruptcy work.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 New York Telephone - 929-800-2397 [email protected]

Send a text12 March 2026 - While going back through all 265 Podcasts to find which podcast has had the most listeners,  I found two Podcasts that for some reason had never been broadcast. One of them was Podcast #41 recorded December 8 or 2021. Podcast #41 has some good insights into the problems with mutual funds  and buybacks.Unfortunately it did not have a transcript with it.I made them available to listeners today.IANIan 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 New York Telephone - 929-800-2397 [email protected]

Send a textOctober 20, 2021This podcast covers the final five chapters of my first investment book, "Income and Wealth from Self-Directed investing".  In it, we explore how 9 information elements are graded to provide a public company's total stock  score. The higher the score, the safer and higher the dividend payments and the more likely the stock will show a capital gain of 9 percent or more in a year.  The highest possible score would be 100 and the lowest would be zero.  Out of the thousands of scores I have calculated, the highest score has been a 78 and the lowest has been a 7. Being able to score and then sort by score, stocks traded on any stock exchange makes it easier for you to build a strong portfolio,  The fact that the stocks in the charts in my books are sorted in descending order by score, price, dividend percent and alphabetically greatly speeds up the process.The following questions are answered in this podcast:(1) If a stock had a share price of $100 how many points would this contribute to its total score?(2) If it was a stock that had not existed 4 years ago, how many points would it contribute to the total score?(3) If five analysts recommended the stock, how many points would this contribute?(4) If a stock was paying dividend yield percent of 8%, how many points would that contribute?(5) If a stock's operating margin exceeded 85%, how many points would that add to the score.(6) If the number of shares trading on average in a day was 9,000 how many points would be added to the score?(7) If the stock were a high-flying technical stock with a price to earnings ratio of 350.1x  how many points would such a high P/E ratio generate?(8) What must you always do after you have identified the 20 stocks in the book you want for your portfolio, and you are now ready to buy?(9) Why are preferred shares not recommended for your portfolio?(10) What industry has the highest scores?In these 32 podcasts I wanted to cover the content of at least one of my investment books  to give those with an interest in investing an idea of what was involved in choosing stocks and building a portfolio. More importantly I wanted you to realize that  with the tools I provide that you are perfectly capable of building a strong dividend portfolio on your own.  If an 80-year-old Miss Innocence can build a strong dividend portfolio, that has grown by hundreds of thousands of dollars over the last 3 years while providing her with a generous income, you also can do it.Next week, I will begin reviewing questions brought to my attention by investors over the last three years.  Some questions in 2020  were projections about stocks being impacted by COVID-19.If you have any questions, please email them to [email protected].  I am usually sitting at my desk working on the "American High Dividend Handbook" and I will likely see your message flash across my screen.  It will give me a break from the tedious job of building hundreds of charts.  That book should be available next month. For information on my novels, investment books and art, visit my website:www.saferbetterdividendinvesting.comIan Duncan MacDonaldInformus Inc (Publishing Division)2 Vista Humber DriveToronto, OntarioM9P 3R7NY Tel : 929-800-2397Toronto Tel: 416-24Ian 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 New York Telephone - 929-800-2397 [email protected]

Send a textWelcome to Safe Dividend Investing’s Podcast # 265 on March 7th of 2026. My name is Ian Duncan MacDonald, and I am the author of 7 investment books. My seventh investment book, Achieving Financial Independence Safely - 200 NYSE Stocks Analyzed and Scored" became available January 3rd on Amazon. You can easily find it by searching in Amazon or Google for "Ian Duncan MacDonald books". For more information on my other books and safe investing go to www.informus.caIn this week's podcast I ask the question, "Can Investment Advisors be Trusted". To  generate enough income to live on an advisor must service and sell a hundred or more investors.  The large financial institutions they work for provide bonuses and other incentives to push the investment advisor to exceed monthly targets. If these objectives are not achieved the investment advisor's job may be terminated. Being an investment advisor is a stressful job. To survive it can result in investment advisors bending the rules. Some financial institution turn a blind eye to practices that are not only shady but pure theft.  Before you turn over your life savings to an investment advisors consider the warnings in this podcast.In my first investment book, "Income and Wealth from Self-Directed Investing" I went into detail in how an 80-year-old widow was not only robbed by the investment advisor in one major bank but also by the investment advisor in the second bank she had transferred her investment portfolio to.  Her attempt to  find an honest investment advisor had failed.She then followed my directions and became a successful self-directed investor who was able to  recover the hundreds of thousands she had lost as a full service investor with the two major banks.I have been retired for 20 years and living very well off my investments. My high net worth continues to grow year-after-year along with my high income. I own no ETFs, no mutual funds or bonds. 100% of my portfolio is in financially strong, high dividend paying stocks. Even when the share prices declined in the market crashes of 2008 and 2020 my dividend income grew and was not impacted.I select the stocks by scoring them.  My background was in building large commercial risk scoring systems that rated millions of companies for banks, insurance companies and trade suppliers. To me stocks are just another form of commercial risk. My objective is to show investors how to safely invest.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 New York Telephone - 929-800-2397 [email protected]

Send a textWelcome to Safe Dividend Investing’s Podcast # 264 on February 28th of 2026. My name is Ian Duncan MacDonald, and I am the author of 7 investment books. My seventh investment book, Achieving Financial Independence Safely - 200 NYSE Stocks Analyzed and Scored" became available January 3rd on Amazon. You can easily find it by searching in Amazon or Google for "Ian Duncan MacDonald books". For more information safe investing go to www.informus.caI have been retired for 20 years and living very well off my investments. My high net worth continues to grow year-after-year along with my high income. I own no ETFs, no mutual funds or bonds. How is the constant growth in my portfolio possible? Why have I never had to sell any of the stocks in my portfolio to maintain my life style?100% of my portfolio is in financially strong, high dividend paying stocks. Even when the share prices declined in the market crashes of 2008 and 2020 my dividend income grew and was not impacted.I select the stocks by scoring them.  Years can go by without my seeing any need to make changes to my safe portfolio of 20 stocks. In this week's podcast I discuss the 8 scoring factors I use to asses stocks. My background was in building commercial risk scoring systems that rated millions of companies for banks, insurance companies and trade suppliers. To me stocks are just another form of commercial risk,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 New York Telephone - 929-800-2397 [email protected]

Send a textWelcome to Safe Dividend Investing’s Podcast # 263 on February 21st of 2026. My name is Ian Duncan MacDonald, and I am an author of 7 investment books. My seventh investment book, Achieving Financial Independence Safely - 200 NYSE Stocks Analyzed and Scored" became available January 3rd on Amazon. You can easily find it by searching in Amazon or Google for "Ian Duncan MacDonald books". How much thought have you put in choosing the bank where you deposit your money? What bank stocks have you chosen to invest in? A quick Google query as to your bank’s ratio of uninsured deposits is either going to reassure you or concern you. Those banks reporting a ratio greater than 50% in uninsured deposits to total deposit have an elevated risk. Bank failures can occur just like they did in 2008 when cheap credit and a failure to determine the credit worthiness of home buyers created an inflated housing bubble. When that bubble burst home buyers lost their mortgage deposits and homeowners saw the equity in their houses disappear.  Business and consumer bankruptcies and foreclosures spiked. Mortgage-backed securities failed resulting in a recession leading to the Lehman Brothers bank failure. This was the largest bank failure in US history. In today's podcast we examine the 5 safest banks in North America and the 5 largest banks in North America.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 New York Telephone - 929-800-2397 [email protected]

Send a textWelcome to Safe Dividend Investing’s Podcast # 262 on February 14th of 2026. My name is Ian Duncan MacDonald, and I am an author of 7 investment books. My seventh investment book, Achieving Financial Independence Safely - 200 NYSE Stocks Analyzed and Scored" became available January 3rd on Amazon. You can easily find it by searching in Amazon or Google for "Ian Duncan MacDonald books". Realizing a good dividend income from a financially strong portfolio does not mean you can ignore unnecessary drains on your income. For example, have you been scammed, conned, cheated, robbed, or otherwise relieved of money today, yesterday, last week or last month by businesses you thought you could trust? Hopefully the loss was only a few hundred dollars. Scammers know that people tend to be more cautious with larger sums. They deliberately keep their scams under a few hundred dollars to remove your incentive to fight to recover what you have lost. The scammers that you will usually encounter aim for high volumes of small, scams rather than a single big one. They count on you treating your loss as a lesson learned and walking away. This allows the scammers to continue scamming others. In today's podcast I will explain how you can recover your money from scammers.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 New York Telephone - 929-800-2397 [email protected]

Send a textWelcome to Safe Dividend Investing’s Podcast # 261 on February 7th of 2026. My name is Ian Duncan MacDonald, and I am an author of 7 investment books. My seventh investment book, Achieving Financial Independence Safely - 200 NYSE Stocks Analyzed and Scored" became available January 3rd on Amazon. You can easily find it by searching in Amazon or Google for "Ian Duncan MacDonald books". I will maintain the introductory price for this new book until I have finished contacting all the previous buyers of my books have been contacted and given a chance to purchase it at its introductory price.In this podcast I discuss the 4% rule. It advises that once you retire you should only sell off 4% of your portfolio each year if you want that portfolio to provide you with a steady income until you are ninety.  However, I have found over the last 20 years that if you carefully invest equally in 20 financially strong companies that have  long histories of paying high dividends you will find that your dividend income and the value of your portfolio will almost automatically keep increasing. There is no reason your portfolio and your dividend income can not keep growing until the day die. Years will go by, where by living within your dividend income you will have no need to sell stocks to live well. Your income will rise ahead of inflation and if you live to 110 your portfolio will still be growing.I wonder if promoting the 4% liquidation rule was a strategy spread by investment advisors to assure them of a reliable income from your portfolio for the next 30 years? If your dividend income is going to roll in automatically from your carefully chosen dividend stocks, what are you paying an advisor tens of thousands of dollars for every year? It has been my experience that few investment advisors know much about dividend investing other than it is a threat to their income. My books are not get-rich-quick books. They are about showing people just like you how to  select, from the thousands of stocks available, those few that are financially strong with long histories of paying ever rising high dividends with ever increasing share  prices.  My objective is to give  investors the confidence  to consider building safe stock portfolios as self-directed investors. Once your  financial independence is realized, you will, like me, enjoy a generous, reliable, income for the rest of your life. Please, visit my website www.informus.ca if you wish to learn more about me and my writing.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 New York Telephone - 929-800-2397 [email protected]

Send a textWelcome to Safe Dividend Investing’s Podcast # 259 on January 24th of 2026. My name is Ian Duncan MacDonald, and I am an author of 7 investment books. My seventh investment book, Achieving Financial Independence Safely - 200 NYSE Stocks Analyzed and Scored" became available January 3rd on Amazon. You can easily find it by searching in Amazon or Google for "Ian Duncan MacDonald books". I will maintain the introductory price for this new book until all the previous buyers of my book have been informed of its release.The latest hyper promotion of Artificial Intelligence penny stocks as the next Microsoft or Nvidia reminds me of the pump and dump strategy of stock promoters pushing gold stocks that I encountered decades ago, early in my career. Today, almost the same language is being used however they are now aided by the  internet and other computerized aids.In this podcast I analyze an actual penny stock and explain what to look for to avoid getting caught up in a pump and dump scheme in which you could lose all your money. It is astounding how much these investment schemes can make for the stock promoters at the expense of investors. No one puts a gun to the head of those purchasing these stocks. They are blinded by what they think is a "sure thing", despite the fact that they have done not even the basic research on the stock. My books are not get-rich-quick books. They are about showing people just like you how to  select, from the thousands of stocks available, those that are financially strong with long histories of paying ever rising high dividends with ever increasing share  prices.  My objective is to give  investors the confidence  to consider building safe stock portfolios as self-directed investors. Once your  financial independence is realized, you will, like me, enjoy a generous, reliable, income for the rest of your lives. Please, visit my website www.informus.ca if you wish to learn more about me and my writing.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 New York Telephone - 929-800-2397 [email protected]

Send a textWelcome to Safe Dividend Investing’s Podcast # 259 on January 24th of 2026. My name is Ian Duncan MacDonald, and I am an author of 7 investment books. My seventh investment book, Achieving Financial Independence Safely - 200 NYSE Stocks Analyzed and Scored" became available January 3rd on Amazon. You can easily find it by searching in Amazon or Google for "Ian Duncan MacDonald books". Until February 10th, it is available at a discounted price.Today, I compare five stocks each with a share price greater than $300. Four of them are AI stocks: Alphabet, Adobe, Microsoft and Meta Platforms. The fifth stock (traded on the New York Stock Exchange) is as far away from being an artificial intelligence stock as you can get but unlike the four AI stocks it has anunusually high dividend yield of 9.65%. It is almost impossible to find a stock with a share price over $100 paying a dividend even as high as 2%. I wondered if this high dividend stock was a scam. I had to investigate this unusual stock and share with you what I learned. My books are not get-rich-quick books. They are about showing people just like you how to  select, from the thousands of stocks available, those that are financially strong with long histories of paying ever rising high dividends and ever increasing share  prices.  The objective of my podcasts is help give investors the confidence  to consider building stock portfolios as self-directed investors. Once your  financial independence is realized, you will, like me, enjoy a generous, reliable, safe income for the rest of your lives. Please, visit my website www.informus.ca if you wish to learn more about me and my writing.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 New York Telephone - 929-800-2397 [email protected]