Check Your Investment Portfolio Once a Month
This is the chorus you’ve heard here before: stop checking your attachments. Let the market do its job. Remain in some blissful ignorance. Trust that your nest egg will grow.
Another reminder in case you are worried about the mere mention of checking your portfolio.
According to analyst Jared Dillian, the best option for verifying your investment is a monthly review. He writes in MarketWatch :
Do not disable paper statements! Take them to your home, and when they come, open them. But don’t go to the site.
Once a month, you need to balance competing concerns about too many negative reviews and willful ignorance. Before the Internet, people did a great job with monthly statements.
Sorry trees. We’ll stick with the paper on this.
“If you look at it too rarely, you may be missing out on an opportunity to change the asset allocation,” continues Dillian. “Most investors should not try to time the market, but I do think there is one, maybe two times in your investment career that could argue for a significant shift in your investment structure.”
Dillian’s advice goes back to the idea that your finances should be boring . Instead of worrying every day about what is happening or not happening in the stock market, you should believe in the power of compounding to gradually increase your investment, despite the daily fluctuations that are talked about (sometimes shouted) on the stock exchange. News.
For those of you who grimace at the suggestion to keep the paper statements, I understand it’s nice to be able to verify information on the World Wide Web. But once you log into your account, it will be harder to resist the urge to meddle in your interests.
If you’re not pulling on a ventilated jacket and heading to the sales floor while you read this, you might miss the urge to keep your portfolio metrics up to date and stick to the monthly review.
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