Getting the Big Moves Right

More than 20 years ago, an idea known as “the latte factor” made its way through personal finance circles. In essence, this idea suggested that small daily spending decisions—buying expensive coffee shop coffee instead of making coffee at home, or buying lunch at a restaurant instead of bringing your lunch to work—cost people big-time.

Proponents would run the numbers. “Just think, if you stopped spending $5 a day on fancy coffee during the week and invested that money instead, by the time you’re 70, you could be a zillionaire!”

Although the idea certainly has merit, getting big financial decisions right—how much you spend on a house or car, for example—will be far more impactful. The same can be said with investing. Getting the big things right is crucial. The big things Successful investing has much more to do with behavioral factors than financial factors. In other words, it has more to do with how you behave than how the market behaves. That should come as good news because, while you have no control over what the market does, you have a lot of control over what you do.

Here are seven big factors that will have a significant impact on your success as an investor, all of which are within your control.

• Whether you have an investment plan. At one point in “Alice in Wonderland,” Alice asks the Cheshire Cat for directions. When the cat says, “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” Alice says, “I don’t much care where.” To which the cat replies, “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.”You probably aren’t so nonchalant about where you’re going. To get to your destination, it’ll help to have a plan. A retirement plan starts with your target retirement date and how much you’re hoping to have in your retirement portfolio by then. Next, you’ll be able to figure out the best steps for getting there.
• How much you invest each month. Generally speaking, for those in the accumulation phase, investing 10 to 15 percent of your monthly gross income should be enough to build a sufficient retirement nest egg. But it depends on how old you are, when you plan to retire, and how much you’re aiming to save. You can get more specific by using MoneyGuide, a powerful retirement planning tool available to SMI premium members for a small one-time fee, or another retirement planning calculator.
• Your asset allocation. There’s no such thing as the perfect portfolio that will put you on the right side of every market move. The “right” mix of investments is the one that generally matches your time frame and risk tolerance.If you’re using SMI’s Fund Upgrading or Just-the-Basics strategies, take SMI’s risk tolerance quiz. That will help you determine an appropriate level of risk in your portfolio. And *that *will help your portfolio generate the level of gains you need from a growing market as well as an acceptable level of losses in a downturn.
• How you choose investments. One of the most common mistakes in investing is deciding too quickly what to invest in. The financial press fosters this, constantly touting this investment or that, as if any particular investment is right for everyone. It’s all very ad-hoc, reactionary, and stressful.It’s far more effective to choose an objective, process-driven investment strategy that tells you how to build a diversified portfolio, when to sell a particular holding, and what to buy next.
• Your point of comparison. To report on the stock market’s performance, the financial press uses an index like the S&P 500. It’s tempting to use it as the benchmark for your** portfolio.However, unless you are solely invested in an S&P 500 index fund, that’s the wrong point of comparison. The right one is the average annual return your portfolio requires to accomplish your goals.
• How often you look. If you pay close attention to the stock market, it can drive you crazy. It goes up, it goes down—seemingly without rhyme or reason. SMI’s primary strategies are updated once a month. That’s often enough to check on the market.
• Your level of commitment. With investing, as with life, it’s easy to think “the grass is always greener on the other side.” To play the comparison game. To head in one direction, only to read a headline or see a promotion that makes you wonder if you’re moving in the right direction.Choose your strategy with care, commit to it, and stay with it.

The little things If you’ve gotten those big things right, you’ve taken some of the most important steps toward investing success. However, it will help a lot if you also let go of the following.

• Daily market “news.” At the end of every trading day, investment reporters are tasked with the unenviable job of explaining why the market did what it did, so they list a reason or two. But what moves the market is usually far too complex to boil it down to a simple explanation. And more importantly, most days’ market news doesn’t even matter. Remember, you’re not in it for every market wiggle. You’re in it for the long haul.
• The “what-if” game. On slow news days, investment reporters often resort to this click-bait script: “If you had invested $1,000 in XYZ company 30 years ago, it would be worth $100,000 today.” Or maybe you were seriously considering a certain investment some time ago but took a pass. You check up on it every now and then and, of course, it went to the moon. Now you torture yourself with an occasional round of “what if?”A related expression of this is questioning one particular investment in your portfolio. Diversification, which reduces risk, recognizes that it’s impossible to know which individual portfolio holding will outperform. Holding numerous investments that were chosen through an objective, rules-based process, puts the odds of success in your favor.The sooner you quit the what-if game, the better.

On this side of heaven, life will never be perfect. That isn’t bad news, it’s helpful news. With investing, it reminds us to focus on getting the big things as right as we can while letting go of the little things.

Image used with permission