Five rules to help avoid investing disaster

A BASIC rule of life is to avoid being a guinea pig in other people’s experiments. This is an inviolable rule of technology: consumers should always leave 1.0 of anything to the early adopters.

All car fanatics know that any brand-new vehicle model will come with bugs, quirks and design issues that tend to get corrected in the second year of production. And anytime finance creates a new product – from CDOs to ETNs to ICOs – smart investors know to give these novel trading vehicles a wide berth until proven safe and effective in a variety of market and economic conditions.