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