Nowadays, hiring a professional to handle your investment portfolio is optional. As long as you keep yourself educated financially, have the right tools, resources, and apps, and can dedicate much time, anyone can successfully manage their investment portfolio like a professional.

As an investor, you can manage your finances and investments better than anyone else and avoid paying a commission. However, it’s not as easy as it seems, and you must be committed to constant learning. Here are some things you should remember when managing your investment portfolio.

Use Financial Tools and Resources

Managing your investment portfolio is easier when you use reliable tools, apps, and resources. Portfolio management tools can help investors track entities like fees, investment returns, and asset allocations. Rather than monitoring a spreadsheet or being scatterbrained, you can leverage a tool that simplifies the process.

An example of this is TradingView, which includes a wide range of charting tools and a significant financial community that you can learn from. Tools like this include indicators allowing you to trade in different securities and track your assets.

Do Research Before Buying Any Securities

Before buying securities like stocks, you should research and analyse them extensively. Whenever professional portfolio managers want to use your money wisely, they perform their due diligence on different securities and put them on a watch list.

Then, they screen this list of securities to ensure they meet specific criteria. After that, they would rank the screened stocks and then size the portfolio based on what protection and how much they want to add. The portfolio’s weight would be based on particular investment objectives, such as maximising returns.

Consider Factors Before Selling

Most investors are plagued by FOMO (fear of missing out), which causes them to sell their securities at the first sign of an upward market trend or cut their losses. But in the same way, when you consider the right time for buying, you should also check the right time for selling.

There are different reasons why you want to sell your securities. For one, it might be adjusting your portfolio if you notice it isn’t following your long-term investment goals. Also, selling would help free up your capital if you need cash to finance a business or pay a debt. 

Furthermore, a common reason is selling your securities to buy more. When the market is going down during a crisis, you can sell your securities and buy the same but at a lower cost. This allows you to buy more for when the market does better.

Diversification is Key

When it comes to portfolio management, one thing you need to know is to avoid putting all your eggs in one basket. It’s essential to diversify your portfolio across different asset classes, as this would reduce one asset’s impact on the portfolio. 

It’s crucial to hold a wide range of securities that are not correlated to each other because if they are connected, their prices will move in the same direction. If your portfolio has stocks but from different companies, they would still move in the same direction. However, you can protect yourself from losses if you have additional assets like stocks, precious metals, bonds, ETFs, index mutual funds, and even cryptocurrency.

Keep Fees and Commissions to a Minimum

One thing that can eat into your returns when making investments is costs. Management fees, trading commissions, transaction fees, and more can reduce the performance of your portfolio. You might also have to deal with taxes and other costs. 

Overlooking fees is a common mistake that new investors make when starting on this journey. You can work with no-free brokers to reduce costs and use low-cost index funds with low expense ratios.

Plan for the Long-Term

It’s important to note that investment is a long-term strategy, so you should remember this when managing your portfolio. Be disciplined when making your investment rather than being distracted by short-term goals.

It’s easy for new investors to be emotional when making investment choices due to fear and greed. Instead, you should put your money into investments on a disciplined basis. When analysing the market, don’t look at the immediate wins or losses but consider the long-term movement of the market before making a decision.

Follow Through With Your Portfolio Goals

When you first create your portfolio, you should have specific investment goals that you want to meet. Starting with a plan is easy, but losing track of your goals and forgetting what you want to achieve is easy. It’s crucial to keep your financial objectives and risk tolerance in mind when managing your portfolio. Regularly monitor and rebalance your portfolio to ensure you achieve your goals.