It’s simple but not easy. When you’re building a portfolio for someone else, emotion plays a much smaller role. When you do it for yourself, it’s easy to get caught up in greed or fear and to make mistakes (like putting most of your funds in Tesla, like one DIYer I met).
Make sure that you will actually review your portfolio every six months and not every two weeks or two years. Set clear parameters and objective measures. Decide how long something can lag (or lead) before you make changes. Then stick to your rules. The hardest part of portfolio management is discipline.
Thanks for the input! I’ve been thinking that’d I’d probably just stick to index funds and avoid (for now) individual companies. My financial advisor does do individual companies (to fit the allocation targets), and does do tax loss harvesting, but I think that might be a bit complicated for my initial attempts.
I had thought about doing something like S&P 500 fund + some set of small and medium cap index funds, rather than trying to identify individual companies that fit into “large/mid/small cap & industry spread”, but even in those broad realms there’s lots of “index 500” funds and lots of “medium/small cap” index funds, how do I figure out which ones to buy and how to compare them?