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Welcome to Safe Dividend Investing’s Podcast # 283 on July 11th of 2026.

Many years ago, I was responsible for building a national commercial risk database of over 2,000,000 businesses to warn banks, insurance companies and trade suppliers of serious financial problems that their commercial customers were encountering. Every business that offers the incentive of credit terms to their customers to make a sale is gambling their repayment terms will be met. If not, it can lead to not only destroying their profits but can lead to business failure.

In this podcast, I share a few insights about the birth and death of businesses that I learned from building this commercial risk database. It can help you to achieve the decades of financial independence from your stock portfolio that I have achieved.

One of the most critical things I have learned in choosing stocks and monitoring the stocks in my portfolios is to pay close attention to a company's operating margin. Today I explain this in detail with particular attention to recently listed penny stocks and how to separate fact from fiction in a stock promoters rhetoric. If you do some very basic research you too can build a strong, safe portfolio.

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
imacd@informus.ca

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Welcome to Safe Dividend Investing’s Podcast # 282 on July 4th of 2026.

Many investors appear to be impressed by current high trading volumes of some stocks. Some companies trade more than 100,000,000 shares in a day. Surely this must be an indicator that the stock is in great demand and that you could not possibly lose money by investing in such a popular stock. However as you will see in this podcast high share trading values can be misleading You must look at other important indicators of strength like profitability, share prices over a dozen or more years, ever increasing dividend prices, book values and so on.

This week we consider the buying of shares in major airlines. With the rapid acceleration of oil prices this year, because of the Iranian war, it has made travel very expensive. When higher costs are combined with attacks on immigrants, it is little wonder that the travel industry has seen revenues shrink by billions of dollars. No one is going to travel to countries that make them feel unwanted or in danger. Although things appear to be improving it may take years before things are back to where they were in 2025.

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
imacd@informus.ca

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Welcome to Safe Dividend Investing’s Podcast # 281 on June 27th of 2026.

This week's podcast is about safe investing. It recommends that you build a reserve fund of cash, or near cash, to be drawn upon in emergencies. Whether you like it or not you are going to be surprised by unexpected large expenses critical to your health and well being.

If you do not have enough cash to cover such unfortunate surprises then you are going to have to quickly borrow money, usually through a credit card. Credit card interest charges very high interest rates if you are unable to pay off your balance each month. With a little bit of planning you can save yourself thousands of dollars in interest charges by creating a reserve fund,

Growing a portfolio that provides you with independence requires not only requires carefully selecting financially strong stocks paying generous reliable dividends but also carefully managing your expenditures.

Your path in life is not predestined. You control your investment decisions.

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
imacd@informus.ca