March 2024 treating your portfolio badly? Read this…

livemint.com:

How are your stocks doing? Which stocks do you own? What’s the return on your stock portfolio? Sometimes, the last question has an “annual" leaning stuck into it – What's your portfolio return over the last year? I bet over the last one year you were peppered with such questions everywhere you went. After all, these are valid questions. All exclusively asked during bull markets.

When markets fall, as they have over the past couple of weeks, almost no question is asked. In fact, you probably dread being asked these questions. While this behaviour is natural, I want to focus today on the primary question you should ask yourself every time you review your performance.

Irrespective of how markets are doing. I'm addressing this today because the markets have taken a knock in recent days. As a result, unbridled greed, and belief in one’s ability to make a killing by punting in the markets is kind of subdued.

This might create space for registering some potentially solid advice on asset allocation. Even before getting to the questions, let me ask you…Do you have a good sense of your net worth? (Net worth is all your assets minus liabilities which includes loans). If you do, you are already in a good place.

If you don’t then, well, you really need to pull out an excel worksheet and get started right away. Let us assume you have a fair sense of what’s happening with your net worth and move ahead. Here’s a broad recap of what happened over the last two weeks.

I will try and be granular, but not too much so we don’t get lost in clutter. Gold rose sharply as the Federal Reserve governor breathed life in hopes of interest rate cuts in the US. Property value doesn't really change in such a short time frame.