About a year ago I hired a financial planner to manage assets in my retirement accounts but am starting to think about doing it myself.
I don’t disagree with the general approach they’re taking, but it seems like it should be simple enough for me to do myself every 6 months or whatever.
The gist of the strategy is a balance across large/mid/small cap and sectors at certain percents along with some % of bond funds and some real estate funds.
I think my main questions are how do I identify and compare various funds that fall into these broad categories to try and pick the ones I want to actually invest in.
The boglehead wiki is a good place to start and reference and the lazy portfolio article has some good details.
OP, unless you have a very large amount of money you can absolutely manage your own retirement. And it’s even easier than you think. Check out the three fund portfolio and other Boglehead articles for answers to your questions.
This doesn’t answer your question.
It’s simple but not easy. When you’re building a portfolio for someone else, emotion plays a much smaller role. When you do it for yourself, it’s easy to get caught up in greed or fear and to make mistakes (like putting most of your funds in Tesla, like one DIYer I met).
Make sure that you will actually review your portfolio every six months and not every two weeks or two years. Set clear parameters and objective measures. Decide how long something can lag (or lead) before you make changes. Then stick to your rules. The hardest part of portfolio management is discipline.
Thanks for the input! I’ve been thinking that’d I’d probably just stick to index funds and avoid (for now) individual companies. My financial advisor does do individual companies (to fit the allocation targets), and does do tax loss harvesting, but I think that might be a bit complicated for my initial attempts.
I had thought about doing something like S&P 500 fund + some set of small and medium cap index funds, rather than trying to identify individual companies that fit into “large/mid/small cap & industry spread”, but even in those broad realms there’s lots of “index 500” funds and lots of “medium/small cap” index funds, how do I figure out which ones to buy and how to compare them?
Sort of a TLDR of Intelligent Investing is a solid route.
Allocate across low-fee index funds. The book goes in depth on the reasoning and percentages, etc.
I always recommend JL Collins Stock Series blog posts as a good starting point for learning how to manage your portfolio.
