It is important to review your investment choices on a regular basis. If you invest in mutual funds, you should review them each February. I suggest February because you will receive your end-of-year statements by February so that you can pay taxes. You should look at these long-term investments and decide if it still fits your strategy and that your mix of investments is correct. If you want some advice on how to balance your portfolio, check out this article that I wrote. As always, I strongly suggest you confine your mutual funds to index funds rather than actively managed funds.
For stocks, the review needs to be a bit more frequent. You need to get out of stocks that no longer perform to your satisfaction. If you are not sure how to evaluate the growth rate and performance of your stocks, please consider reading my book, “The Confident Investor” as it will help you analyze companies to find the Good ones.
For the next several weeks, I will be doing a daily review of the companies on my Watch List. I will take off those companies that are no longer performing to my satisfaction. As a point of disclaimer, as quickly as possible after taking the stock off of my Watch List, I will also be selling any holding that I have in any of those poorly performing companies. If you would like to make sure you get these updates:
- You can subscribe to my weekly newsletter digest of this site.
- You can follow me on Twitter @ConfidentInvest.
- You can subscribe to my RSS feed.
I regularly enjoy watching Jim Cramer of Mad Money on CNBC. One of the things that I most enjoy about him is that occasionally he admits when he is wrong. While I am not saying that I was wrong to put a company on my Watch List and then eventually take it off, I am saying that the base fundamentals of the company have changed. I am firing that company from my portfolio (I guess that makes me a little like another famous investor, Donald Trump).