Investing and tracking the performance of your investments are two very, very different things, and the less time you spend on the latter, and the more regularly you commit to the former, the better off you will be.
Investing is essentially taking money that you would have either spent on consumption (clothes, cars, furniture, country club dues, etc.) or lent to a bank (in the form of a savings account) and instead purchasing assets1. Ideally those assets would be mostly publicly traded equities held in a broadly diversified way, because 1) That’s a liquid asset that you can sell at any time to fund your goals, 2) Tracking the stock market passively in this way is basically free, and 3) The allocation to stocks as a broad asset class is by far the most meaningful strategic decision you can make as an investor.
If you do ^that^ over and over again, and if you can successfully avoid bad behavior (like tracking the performance of your investments over any short time period), then that’s basically it. It’s not easy, and behavior management is a huge part of the value of a good advisor or coach, but most of the complexity we want to engineer into investing on top of those basic tenets is unnecessary and ineffective.
- Or plowing back into a business you own personally. In fact, the image of investing in a business you own is probably a helpful one for those who are investing in publicly traded securities. A business owner does not obsess over the “valuation” of her business from day to day. The concept would not even make sense to her. Every once in a way she may get a valuation done for purposes of a transaction, but generally speaking, she is laser focused on the processes that will over time accrue to enterprise value. For investors, a similar laser focus on process would be very wise, and that process looks like: keep saving and buying and let the businesses you own do their thing over time. ↩︎
Meaningful Returns 