I’m a long-term investor, which means that I’m more worried about what my dividend stock portfolio is going to look like in 10 or 20 or 30 years from now than I am about it in this current year.
I know that there are lots of people who look at the market news and their brokerage account every single day and are paying attention to even little fluctuations in value. I would consider many of these people more “traders” than “investors.” I would certainly fall into the “investor” category.
I actually think it’s just not that helpful to follow things so closely because with news, come greed and fear and as I’ve talked about before, emotion is a really terrible way to run your portfolio. Not that ignorance is a good thing either, but balance is definitely needed.
As a result, I check my portfolio once/month when I’m doing my monthly passive income report and I’ll look at the following things:
1. My good-to-cancel orders. Do I still want these to remain open?
2. Is there anything I’ve been waiting to sell that has reached my target price?
3. Is there any stock that has had a significant run and is now too large of a portion of my portfolio? (which means, it’s time to sell a part of it).
4. What is my cash/margin situation? Should I be buying more stocks? If yes, which ones?
5. Is there any bad news such as dividend cuts? Do I want to sell?
That’s about it. It generally takes me around 2 hours, although if I have money to spend, I’ll take a lot more time to decide which stock(s) to buy. Same with sell decisions, because I try to figure out if short-term trouble is just a bump in the road, or an indication of bad things to come in the long-term.
