I Know What I Should Do With My Portfolio. I Haven't Done It.

I spent most of this week building spreadsheets.

Forecasts for this financial year. Budgets for next. Numbers arranged in columns, projected forward, sense-checked, revised, projected again. Commentaries on the variances to last forecast, to last month, then further explanations on the commentaries and clarifications on the explanations. It is the kind of work that feels productive in a very specific way – the way that involves a lot of staring at cells and a growing suspicion that the confidence implied by three decimal places is not entirely warranted.

At the same time, quietly, in an account I barely looked at, my portfolio was doing something I had nothing to do with.

Up 130% from its low point. In a week plus some. Give or take.

I did not rebalance. I did not add capital at the bottom. I did not have a particularly insightful read on how the Iran ceasefire would play out. What I did was mostly avoid looking at it during the worst of the wobble, get absorbed in work deadlines, and find that when I eventually checked back in, the market had apparently decided everything was fine.

This is, I know, exactly what the research says will happen if you just leave it alone.

There's a piece of investing wisdom that gets passed around with the confidence of something that has been proven many times over, because it has. The version I like goes roughly like this: the best thing most retail investors can do after putting their money in is to forget where they put it, change the password to something they won't remember, and check back in twelve months.

The data supports this more than most people want to admit. Studies consistently show that the more frequently retail investors check and trade their portfolios, the worse they perform – not because they're making obviously bad decisions, but because they're making more decisions, and each additional decision is another opportunity to be wrong at the wrong moment. The investor who sold in late March, when the Iran blockade was announced and futures were down 1% overnight, locked in a loss that had fully reversed within a fortnight.

The investor who was busy building budget spreadsheets and forgot to panic did fine.

I'm not going to pretend this was strategy. It was workload. But the outcome was the same.

Now, here is where it gets more complicated, and more honest.

My portfolio isn't a simple index fund that I can genuinely forget about. It involves options – leveraged instruments with expiry dates. This changes the calculus in ways that matter.

The forget-the-password wisdom assumes that time is neutral. That the longer you hold, the more the compounding works in your favour, and the less the short-term noise matters. For most long-term equity positions, this is true. But options have a clock. They don't care whether the market eventually agrees with your thesis. They only care whether it agrees before the expiry.

So I cannot entirely forget the password. The position needs monitoring. The wisdom applies to the attitude – stay calm, don't react to noise, trust the underlying thesis – but not to the administration.

There's also the question of the stop loss I haven't set.

A 130% paper gain is a meaningful number. The textbook move, the thing any sensible risk management framework would suggest, is to set a stop loss somewhere in positive territory – to lock in at least some of that gain against the scenario where the market changes its mind with the same speed it made it.

I haven't done this. Not because I've forgotten, but because I haven't worked out a methodology I'm satisfied with. Setting a stop loss too tight and you get stopped out on normal intraday noise, miss the continued upside, and feel like an idiot. Setting it too loose and it doesn't really protect anything. Getting it right requires more thinking than I've had time to do this week, between the forecasts, budgets, comments, explanations and the general busyness of a week that had a lot going on.

And – if I'm being completely honest – there's a part of me that doesn't want to set it, because setting it makes the upside finite. It turns an open question into a closed one.

Which is probably not a sufficient reason not to do it.

I wrote in last weekend's musing about the Apostle Paul's honest confession: the good I want to do, I don't do. I wasn't thinking about stop losses at the time. But the structure is the same.

I know what the sensible thing is. I have the access and the capability to do it. I have a legitimate reason to pause – the methodology question is real – but I also know the methodology question is partly convenient. It gives me something to point to.

This, I suspect, is what investing actually looks like for most people, most of the time. Not a clean application of principles, but a negotiation between what you know, what you feel, what you've had time to think through, and what you're avoiding thinking about because there's a budget due on Friday.

The market, meanwhile, doesn't know or care about any of this. It just moves. This week it moved in my direction, for reasons I can explain in retrospect and couldn't have predicted in advance.

That's the honest version of the 130% gain. Not skill. Not strategy. Largely, not looking.

I'll sort out the stop loss next week.

Probably.

Do you have a position you know you should act on and haven't? I'm clearly not alone in this.
👉 Hit reply and share your thoughts – I’d love to hear what’s resonating with you.

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The Power of Automation – Systematic Investing

Alright, L-Plate Retirees! We’ve covered the big-picture strategies of global diversification, asset allocation, and rebalancing. Now, let’s talk about the engine that drives it all: Systematic Investing. This is the secret to putting your investment plan on autopilot and avoiding the emotional roller coaster of the market.

Systematic Investing is all about making regular, predetermined investments, regardless of what the market is doing. The most common and powerful systematic approach is Dollar-Cost Averaging (DCA). This simply means investing a fixed amount of money at regular intervals, like every month or quarter. It’s the ultimate “set it and forget it” strategy.

Why is DCA so effective? Because it removes the impossible task of market timing. Instead of trying to guess the perfect moment to buy, you invest consistently. When prices are low, your fixed investment buys more shares. When prices are high, it buys fewer shares. Over time, this averages out your purchase price, reducing the risk of investing a large lump sum at a market peak. It’s a beautifully simple way to manage volatility and a core principle of disciplined investing.

Consider this: you invest $500 every month into a fund. In a down month, your $500 buys more shares. In an up month, it buys fewer. This disciplined process helps you accumulate more shares at lower prices, which can significantly boost your long-term returns. It’s a practical application of the “buy low” principle we discussed in our rebalancing lesson.

For L-Plate Retirees, a systematic approach is your best friend. It automates your investment plan, removes emotion, and helps you build wealth steadily over time. It’s the most reliable way to stay on track and achieve your financial goals.

L-Plate Takeaways:

• Automate Your Investing: A systematic approach removes emotion and ensures you invest consistently.

• Embrace Dollar-Cost Averaging (DCA): Invest a fixed amount regularly to average out your purchase price and reduce risk.

• Forget Market Timing: DCA removes the need to guess the market’s next move.

• Buy More for Less: DCA allows you to accumulate more shares when prices are low.

• Discipline is the Key: A systematic approach is the foundation of a sound, long-term investment strategy, reinforcing the lessons from Behavioral Finance.