The Internet is an amazing source of investment advice.

The Internet is an amazing source of investment advice. Surf the Web and learn. It is quick. It is easy. And it can be wrong. The big thing to be, along with curious, is discerning. I asked Perplexity, an Ai program I really like, where to get advice on how to be a discerning investor. Its answer: follow the advice from Investopedia.com.

The following are five tips from Investopedia on how to be discerning when doing financial research.

• Verify the credibility and qualifications of the source providing investment advice. Look for reputable, established websites and avoid anonymous or unverified sources.
  
  
• Scrutinizing claims. Do your own research to validate any investment recommendations or strategies. Don't blindly trust what you read online.
  
  
• Understand the risks and limitations of any investment product or strategy before committing your money. For instance, Investopedia explains complex financial concepts in easy-to-understand terms.
  
  
• Recognize the difference between investing and speculating. Investopedia emphasizes the importance of a long-term, diversified approach over get-rich-quick schemes.
  
  
• Develop critical thinking skills to identify potential biases, conflicts of interest, or misleading information in online investment advice.
  
  

My financial blog is an anonymous, unverified source. I realize this and so I take pains to apply the four other rules listed above and you should too.

For instance, I like REITs as a retirement investment. But REITs were yesterday's darling. Not today's. I have wisely or unwisely kept the faith. My goal is to have eight percent of my retirement portfolio in REITs. I actually have just a little more than seven percent.

I used to invest in individual REITs. No more. Instead, I have two ETFs: ZRE and RIT. ZRE is the BMO Equal Weight REITs Index ETF. It closed Friday at $20.70, yielding 5.217%. RIT is the CI Canadian REIT ETF which closed Friday at $16.15, yielding 5.015%. I may be down a little more than $7000.

On the plus side, I earn about $3500 annually from my REITs. As I have owned REITs for more than a decade, I feel confident that on the whole I am in the black. As my REITs are all held within two ETFs, I think of them as being self-balanced. ZRE follows an index approach while RIT is actually managed. Management costs money and for this reason the RIT MER is higher than the ZRE MER.

Why do I pay the higher MER? Well, the RIT holdings are quite different than those of ZRE. I like diversity. Also, RIT holds some U.S. REITs. I like that as well. And, when it comes to capital gains, RIT often bests ZRE. ZRE is the purple line in the one year graph above which I downloaded from the TSX website.

Even though it is written from an American perspective, the following linked article is quite good: How to invest in REITs. For a Canadian viewpoint, click this link: Why we invest in REITs - 5 Best Canadian REITs for 2024. This is from the TAWCAN blog. An excellent blog by a very wise Taiwanese Canadian.