Two failures are common and they are opposites. One is looking at holdings every day and reacting to noise. The other is not looking for three years and discovering something only when it has become expensive.
A routine fixes both, because it separates the checks that genuinely need doing from the urge to do something.
Monthly: administration, not decisions
The monthly check should take ten minutes and should not involve any judgement about whether to buy or sell. It exists to catch things that have gone wrong operationally.
Read the depository statement. It comes from the institution that holds the ownership record rather than from your broker, which is exactly what makes it a useful independent check. Confirm the holdings match what your broker's application shows.
Check for corporate action notices. Rights issues, buybacks, delisting offers and similar arrive with short windows and firm dates. Most of the money lost to these is lost by people who never opened the notice.
Confirm your contact details are still correct, particularly after changing a phone number or leaving an employer whose email you had used.
Note whether anything was credited or debited that you did not expect. A dividend, a charge, an unexpected debit.
That is the whole monthly exercise. Deliberately, it contains nothing about price. Looking at valuations monthly invites a decision, and monthly is far too often to be making decisions about holdings bought for a decade.
Quarterly: has the business changed
Once a quarter, results are published and there is something real to read. This is the check that matters.
For each company you hold directly, the useful questions are narrow:
Has revenue continued to grow, compared with the same quarter a year earlier? Seasonality makes consecutive quarters misleading in most Indian industries.
Has the operating margin held? Growth bought by giving up margin is a different thing from growth.
Has borrowing or interest cost moved sharply? This is where difficulty appears earliest and it is the line most often skipped.
Did anything appear in the auditor's limited review? A qualification there is worth more attention than the entire results table.
Has promoter shareholding or pledging changed? Disclosed alongside results and quick to check.
Then the question that governs all of them: does this change the reason I bought it? If the original reason was that the business was growing profitably with manageable debt, and that remains true, a falling price is not information about the business. If the original reason has stopped being true, that is the case for acting — and it will be visible in these lines rather than in the price.
If you hold funds rather than individual companies, the quarterly check is simpler still: confirm nothing structural has changed — the manager, the mandate, the costs — and otherwise do nothing.
Annually: the two things worth an hour
Once a year, two exercises that are genuinely worth setting aside time for.
Recalculate the allocation. Write down everything you own at realistic values, subtract the debt, and compute the percentages. After a strong year in one asset the split has drifted from whatever you chose, and correcting it is the only reliable mechanism that makes you reduce what has run and add to what has not. Do as much of the correction as possible by directing new contributions rather than by selling, because selling realises a tax liability.
Check for overlap and accidental concentration. Several broad funds frequently hold much the same large companies, so four of them can be one position held four times. Employer shares plus salary is one exposure counted twice. Neither is visible unless you look for it deliberately.
The annual review is also the right moment to revisit the amount you contribute. A figure chosen when you earned less is now a smaller share of your income, and that gap has been going somewhere.
What the annual review is not for: comparing your results against an index and concluding something about your ability from one year. A single year tells you about the year.
When doing nothing is the correct action
This is the part a review routine is really protecting, and it deserves stating directly.
A price falling is not a reason to act. It is a reason to check whether the business changed. If it did not, the fall is the market's opinion and you are entitled to disagree with it by doing nothing.
A price rising is not a reason to act either. Selling a good business because it went up, and then paying tax on the gain, is a decision that has to beat holding by enough to cover the tax before it has produced anything.
A bad quarter is not a trend. One quarter is noise in most businesses. Three or four consecutive quarters moving in the same direction is a trend, and the routine above will show it.
Boredom is not information. A holding that has done nothing for eighteen months is not failing. It is being held, which is the activity you signed up for.
The measure of a good routine is not how many changes it produces. It is that the changes it does produce are traceable to something that actually happened in a business, and that everything else was left alone on purpose rather than by neglect.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How often should I check my investments?
Monthly for administration — statements, corporate action notices, contact details. Quarterly for whether the businesses changed, when results are published. Annually for allocation and overlap. Checking prices more often than that mostly invites decisions you did not need to make.
Should I sell a share that has fallen?
Only if the reason you bought it has stopped being true, which shows up in revenue, margins, borrowing and the auditor's review rather than in the price. A fall with an unchanged business is the market's opinion, and you may disagree with it by doing nothing.
What should I look at in quarterly results?
Revenue against the same quarter a year earlier, whether operating margin held, whether borrowing or interest cost moved sharply, anything in the auditor's limited review, and any change in promoter shareholding or pledging.
How do I rebalance without a large tax bill?
Direct new contributions towards whichever part has fallen behind rather than selling what has run ahead. For anyone still adding money regularly this handles most of the drift, and selling realises a liability that a holding left alone does not.
Is it a problem if a holding does nothing for a year?
No. A holding that has not moved is not failing; it is being held. The routine exists so that changes you make are traceable to something that happened in a business, and everything else is left alone deliberately rather than through neglect.
Related Reading
- Reading the results announcement itself
- Recomputing the split once a year
- Why the depository statement is the check
- The notices with short windows
- What selling to rebalance costs
- The equivalent record for trading
Disclaimer: TheFinBaba provides educational content only - this is not investment advice. Trading involves risk of loss.
