2 Important Questions

Guide Your Investing Strategy

There is an investment strategy out there for just about everyone, whether you want to be aggressive or preserve your capital long-term. It can be easy to get bogged down in the Investing section of Google, looking at all the articles promising to make you rich in five easy steps. Whether you have been receiving financial planning advice for 30 years or for three months, circling the wagons and looking at your processes is a great idea to make sure you and your advisor miss nothing—and are open to improving.

Before you make your next investing change, start that 401k rollover to an IRA, or get more of your money to work consider these two questions (and share your answers with your financial advisor):

Are they written down and clearly defined?

Did you establish a time frame—when will you need the money?

And what do you need it for?

To pay for college, to buy a house, to fund your retirement?

What’s the amount of risk you can tolerate?

Do you want to invest in mutual funds, individual stocks, or exchange-traded
funds?

It’s important to capture all this information to help keep you on track.

Remember, for most investors, retirement is often the end goal of investing your savings, which means this is a marathon not a sprint.

Strategy is vital: Investing is too important to simply wing it.

For many investors, it’s a bad idea to just shoot from the hip and buy the latest stock mentioned on TV that morning, without doing due diligence into the prospective purchase.

Will you make decisions based on fundamental data like the company’s sales growth, cash flow, and debt level?

Will chart patterns, price, and volume be a consideration?

Looking back at your risk profile from step one, you need an exit strategy before you buy a single share. This can help prevent emotion from taking over and muddling your original plan. If an investment drops 50 percent and shows little sign of rebounding, would you dump it?