Portfolio Review Checklist

How you review your portfolio has a significant impact on whether you achieve your goals. A good portfolio process measures your portfolio against your strategy and goals. It also prompts you to consider what might change to prompt a reassessment of your personal wealth-building process.

The Portfolio Review Checklist will help you focus on the key factors governing whether any action needed. There are two key parts to the checklist.

The first part covers investments. It prompts you to analyze your stocks, bonds, mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) against your sell rules for each. When looking at each investment, you should ask yourself whether or not it violates one of your preset rules. These rules should be listed on your portfolio composition and notes worksheet.

For each type of investment, there is a field to set the date of your next review and a prompt to set up a reminder for it. The logic being that is if you have dates and reminders set up, you may start to look at your portfolio less often knowing there is a process in place. Your tendency to emotionally react to changes in the portfolio’s value will drop the less frequently you look at it.

Each type of investment may have a different date. Stocks will need to be looked at more frequently because of quarterly earnings. Mutual funds tend to be longer-term holdings and can be reviewed annually, especially those targeting broader categories or asset classes.

The second part covers your portfolio allocation. It asks you to consider whether something has occurred to alter your investment profile. If the answer is yes, go back through the wealth-building process. The rationale for doing this annually is to catch changes early enough to strategically transition your portfolio as opposed to having to make sudden and significant changes over a short period of time.

PDF worksheet available for download.

Excel worksheet available for download.

Example: Young Couple’s Portfolio Review

Frank and Sue are a young couple with a three-year-old son and a newborn daughter. They own both stocks and mutual funds.

The couple’s portfolio and composition worksheet calls for Frank to sell any stocks with a Value Grade of F. It also tells the couple to monitor the objectives and indexes followed by the funds they own.

Here’s how they would use the portfolio review checklist during their first portfolio review following the birth of their daughter.