Escape Plan is a movie staring Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger in which Sylvester Stallone is hired by governments and private security companies to break out of their unbreakable prisons. If you examine prisons they are designed and built to keep people in and for 99.99% of the people they do their job. If the movie, Stallone plays a person who figures how to get out. The first step of his job is to watch the routines of the people or the guards. Then he can began to look for opportunities to escape. To escape means to have both knowledge and the ability to improvise with what is there. In one example he peels off the wax on the milk carton to be able to see what the numbers used on the alarm systems are – then by trying various combinations the numbers will be in the correct order. Much of the job is silent observing, seeing without saying anything.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, if you watch the markets over a period of time there will be patterns to be found. Some of them are reasonably obvious, some of them need a more trained eye to figure out. One of the obvious patterns is profitable companies should be worth more than non profitable companies (with a few exceptions). If a company can become profitable and stay there for a number of business cycles it is worth owning. Dividend companies fit these patterns or this is where the easy money is to be made. Investing in companies that will move to higher multiples and receiving a payment as the market rewards the shareholders is a good thing with limited risk. There are many patterns on the stock exchange take advantage of the easy ones.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.